Sony VAIO PCG-R505TE & NetGear FA511 CardBus mobile adapter

hello everyone,

i have a Sony VAIO PCG-R505TE which I recently installed Debian Potato onto and then recompiled the kernel to 2.4.19, patching the kernel to add ACPI support so as to fix some BIOS issues I was having. This has fixed it enough to where it will assign an IRQ to my NetGear FA511 CardBus PCMCIA network adapter, but now when I type "cardmgr" and put in the FA511 (or if i have it in already and then type "cardmgr") linux locks up and I have to cold boot the laptop.

oddly enough, while it is locked up if i go to another computer on my network and ping it's IP of 192.168.1.105 i can get ping responses, but since the computer is then locked up having the network card finally work is doing me very little good...

I have read through http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/ and searched google but cannot seem to resolve this issue. there's nothing in dmesg or daemon.log about cardmgr having been started even nor any errors so it's like as if when cardmgr is started it locks up the entire system thereby not putting anything into the log files...

any suggestions or has this happened to anyone else out there? thanks in advance!