Partial progress, but now all firmwares fail on dlink dwl-650p

[re2823 at Safe-mail.net]

Hi again.

I've managed to get round the bug I had with my dlink dwl-650p not
producing a wlan0 interface
(http://hostap.epitest.fi/bugz/show_bug.cgi?id=197) by editing the
source code inside hostap_cs.c and recompiling the module. Now, whenever
I insert my dwl-650p, I get both a new wifi0 interface, a new wlan0
interface, and a wlan0 directory inside /proc/net/hostap - woohoo!

I'm now trying to work out what to do next. If I try to bring up the
interface (ifconfig wlan0 up), the command fails silently (on the
command line) but the following is appended to the syslog:

kernel: wlan0: could not set interface UP - no PRI f/w

I've read all I can find from google regarding firmwares for this card
(including http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/firmware/readme.html and
http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/) so my next step is to download
the latest firmware tarball from:
http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/firmware/Latest-prism.tar.bz2
and unpack the 18 firmware files. I then try "prism2_srec wlan0
<firmware file>" with all 18 firmware files, and every single file
returns the following error:

ioctl[PRISM2_IOCTL_HOSTAPD]: Inappropriate ioctl for device
Missing wlan component info
Could not read wlan RIDs

My questions are:

1) Am i going about this the right way?

2) Which firmware file should I use and, more importantly, how do you
know/how am I supposed to find out?

3) How come there's no "master list" of firmwares vs. pci/pcmcia card id
(this is really linked to question 2).

4) Is this supposed to be this difficult? Shouldn't this all be setup as
a udev rule, or some suitable pcmcia equivalent, so that plugging in my
pcmcia produces a useable wifi interface? (see question 3!)

Thanks for any help you can offer, Jaime