Strange Happenings at the Fedora Core 4 Corral

[Jerry LeVan]

Hi,
I am running FC4 kernel 2.6.14 with an IPW2200 wireless card in a Centrino
laptop. Also I have installed ieee80211-1.1.6, ipw2200-firmware-2.4.7 and
ipw2200-1.0.8-34 rpms from the at repository

A couple of days ago I decided to try to get WPA going, I downloaded
the WPA_Supplicant-0.4.7 package and after a few miss steps I
seem to have it going ok...

I have config'ed the Linksys wrt54 wireless to use wpa-psk.

My computer is "set up" to use eth1 in wep mode. However
I normally have to do an /sbin/ifup eth1 in order to get an ip.
I do this in my session startup.

Now if I boot and after I get the desktop manually start
wpa_supplicant and then do an ifup eth1, everything works
fine,

However if I start wpa_supplicant from rc.local and put the
ifup eth1 in my session startup scripts, bad things generally
happen,
   One time the X session completely froze, the (usb) keyboard
   was dead and I could not get another console, I had to crash
   the system.

   Another time the name server "locked up" and would not
  resolve "external names".

   Yet another time the top panel in gnome vanished!
   Sometimes I cannot even launch a terminal session.

  None of this ever happens when I use the fc4 wep setup.
  Bad things don't happen if I wait until the system has stabilized
  before I launch wpa_supplicant.
 
  I really would like WPA to be active "automatically" so I
  don't have to take a couple of minutes to manually start
 the wpa stuff.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Jerry