Laptops :: weird pcmcia problem



I got a pcmcia to usb2 card today and when i stick it in my pcmcia slot on my old laptop(using damn small linux hdinstall -- well its more like debian sarge now...i did a dist-upgrade from sarge mirrors), the wireless card which is in the other slot then refuses to work, the usb only seems to work with devices that are in it on bootup and the system locks up if i eject the card while the computer is booted up.

Anyone got any idea's? I've been asking on the debian and damn small linux irc channels, googleing it and so far with little success.
I just tried removing the usb pcmcia card when i was just at command line and no graphical stuff
and, it says:
usb-hoci.c: 01:00.0 device removed!
usb-hoci.c: 01:00.1 device removed!
usb-hoci.c: 01:00.0 device removed!
usb-hoci.c: 01:00.1 device removed!
usb-hoci.c: 01:00.0 device removed!
usb-hoci.c: 01:00.1 device removed!

and then under that it has a flashing dash.  I tried pressing ctrl-c here and it didnt do anything, Any ideas on how i can get past that?

It is infact picking up devices that i plug into usb when its booted up....i was testing it with a usb flash drive and was just running fdisk -l and it just wasent listing it but, i was able to mount it so, i guess thats fine.

I still have the problem of the wireless card not working when the pcmcia to usb card is in and i have no idea how to go about fixing it.....
You should not upgrade to Debian Sarge. If you upgraded it, it will be totally different from DSL. You should boot from DSL CD and see what will come up. Pls give more detail about your old laptop and PCMCIA card also.
The laptop is a compaq Armada 1560D, its a pentium mmx 166mhz, 32mb ram. The usb card is an NEC USB2.0 cardbus and, the wireless card is a netgear WG511T.

I tried booting from live cd and, it locks up when i attempt to connect to the wireless access point while i have both cards in.  Works fine when just the wireless card is in and, the usb card works fine with or without the wireless card in

Also, i found a way to remove the pcmcia card without error, if i kill the process cardmgr first, it lets me remove it without problems
have you tried switching the cards around to see what happens?  Could this be caused by card type problems?  I have seen laptop specs that says two type X cards one type Y card.  Not sure if this applys here but worth a look maybe.  Whatever the cause it sounds like a resource conflict to me (both cards sharing the same irq or address space) or the second card over riding the first card (i.e. the first question).  Have you tried other card combinations?
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