Orinoco (original silver card) firmware versions

[Nathan Stratton Treadway]

I have several "original" (branded "Lucent Technologies") Orinoco Silver
wireless cards that I'm using under linux.  They came with "Lucent/Agere
firware version 8.10" installed (as reported by the orinoco_cs driver;
the Windows software also reports "Stations Functions firmware Variant
2, Version 8.10").

I found this warning message posted a bit over a year ago
  http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/wireless/2002-July/001725.html
and see that this warning is still mentioned on the LucentWirelessCard
page at Seattle Wireless (
  http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/LucentWirelessCard#line97
[in the "Fireware Releases" section]) as the "last word" on the topic. 
I wasn't able to find any details of what problems people were seeing.

Also, Jean Tourrilhes page on the Orinoco card only goes up to firmware
version 7.28:
  http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Orinoco.html#issues


However, I noticed that Agere released a v8.42 firmware at some point
(May 2002, I guess), and Proxim currently offers a download for an
firmware v8.72 installer:

  http://www.proxim.com/support/all/orinoco/software/pdf/sr02_firmware_readme.txt
  

My two questions are: 
   * What sorts of problems whould I be watching for using v8.10 under
     Linux?  (Or, is there a URL pointing to a discusson on this topic
     that I've missed?) 

   * Anyone had any experience using v8.72 under linux?  Any compelling
     reasons to upgrade or avoid upgrading?

Thanks.

						Nathan

p.s. Currently, I'm using the orinoco_cs v0.11b driver (from the linux
2.4.20 distribution), for what it's worth.
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Nathan Stratton Treadway      | nathanst at ontko.com |  Mid-Atlantic region    
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