I did observe the same behaviour (as in bug 573327) two weeks (or so)
ago on my laptop with atheros Wifi-lan, therefore I switched back to a
wired connection again. To me it sees to be related with the inability of
iwconfig to associate the wireless card to my acces-point.

Currently the garbling of the essid apears to have been solved.
But iwconfig is still not able to associate my atheros
(lspci: 04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5001
Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01))
to the accesspoint as before the beginning of february 2010.

Under Kubuntu-9.04 on the same machine the connection is functional,
so to me it looks like a debian-problem.

Reverting back to version wireless-tools 28-1 did not solve the problem for my
case, so to me its a bit confusing.
Another small confusion was the change of name of the interface from
ath0 to wlan0 after I finished a fresh debian install.

The problem persists in both stock kernel 2.6.32-3-686 and my own 2.6.33.

please tell me if, and which other piece(s) of information you might require
to solve this, I 'd be gratefull for a solution (I 'd like to stick to
Debian like I did since Guus gave me those install CD's some 11 years
ago on the "Warande")

Example:
root@hugin]/root/Wlan>/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 essid asgard
root@hugin]/root/Wlan>/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 key XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

root@hugin]/root/Wlan>iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:"asgard"
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=20 dBm
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XX
          Power Management:off

pan0      no wireless extensions.

but when issueing:
/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 ap 00:13:10:3F:73:AF
The value for Access Point remains "Not Associated" and the
essid disappears completely.

would be nice to have this fixed, please ask me if you need
additional information.

regards, Hans de Jonge

unmerge 574087
severity 574087 important
thanks

Sorry for the very late reply! I've unmerged this bug, and reduced the
severity since this affects only some users.

Was there a difference between kernels/wireless drivers on Kubuntu and Debian?
Also, some drivers need the interface to be up when you set the ESSID,
otherwise they do not try to connect to an access point.

Can you try setting adding this to /etc/network/interfaces:

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
	wireless-essid asgard
	wireless-key XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

And then use "ifup wlan0" to bring up the interface? If that doesn't work, can
you try NetworkManager and see if that works with your card?