Moving to 2.6 - worried about a few things

I haven't been very persistent in getting 2.5.x to work on my
PCG-R505R/GK running Gentoo Linux, but I've eventually figured out how
to do most things. Now that 2.6 is out, I'd like to leave 2.4 behind for
good. Could someone kindly point me in the right direction for the one
thing I've been unable to get working on my own? 'thing is I'm running
two WLAN cards (an old Orinoco Silver and a Prism 2.5-based Netgear
MA401) with the help of the pcmcia-cs standalone package because I
didn't get the 2.4 kernel to take care of the wireless stuff in
combination with hotplugging. But recompiling pcmcia-cs in the new
kernel environment doesn't make it load any of the necessary modules,
what do I need to do? Or would you recommend using the kernel instead?

Thanks a lot, cheers
Ulrich Plate