DWL-1000AP & DWL-650 poor performance

[Jamin W.Collins]

I've had a working wireless lan with a DWL-1000AP and two DWL-650 pcmcia
cards for a while now.  However rather recently, I've noticed very poor
performance from the wireless cards, even when within a few feet of the
AP.  I'm hoping that someone here might be able to help me isolate and/or
understand what's happening.  

The majority of my home wired network is switched, and has a normal
latency from any given system to another of ~0.2ms on the wire.  However
with the wireless card I'm experiencing latencies of ~6ms to start with
and then they spike to the mid 3000-4000ms range (this appears to be when
there's any kind of transfer other than pings occuring).  

When doing periodic updates of the Debian available package listings from
my local mirror, I'm lucky to get 7000B/s.  So, updating the list of
available packages literally takes minutes to complete.  Such as this
update that was done approximately 4 feet from the AP:

  Fetched 5107kB in 12m32s (6784B/s)

While a similiar update from the same server on the wired side is:

  Fetched 5707kB in 3s (1430kB/s)           

I realize that wireless connections are slower than wired connections and
expect them to be so, but this seem out of the ordinary to me.

My main laptop is running Debian testing (aka sarge) with a 2.4.18 kernel.
 I'm using the stock orinoco_cs driver with the kernel for the DWL-650
card (which appears to be 0.09b).  

I'm happy to provide more information, I'm just not sure what would be
useful.

-- 
Jamin W. Collins