I had been having problems with my D-LINK DWL-650 802.11b card loosing link with my base station quite frequently. I also could not upload even a tiny amount of data without loosing link. I had been using the kernel orinoco_cs driver, but decided to try the linux-wlan-ng driver instead to see if it would be any better. Deep inside a README somewhere I found out that this is a known issue with these cards. Fortunately, the linux-wlan-ng driver has the ability to do the WEP encryption/decryption on the host cpu instead of on the card. Using this setting, I have not had a link failure so far! Unfortunately, Red Hat has refused in the past to include these drivers due to their "unsuitablity" for inclusion into the kernel. I hope that they will be included with Fedora at some point. While it works with a standalone install, none of the configuration is integrated with Fedora's GUI system config tools, which is a bummer.