sephe, After playing with the kernel some more I was unable to reproduce the crash. I also discovered that I had forgotten to apply the cardbus patch you previously recommended. After applying that patch, the 802.11 and the netgear patch I recompiled the kernel again from scratch, using my previous custom config. I also rebuilt the ath modules from the new tarball. However the ath_rate and the if_ath modules still refused to load on boot, manuallt forcing them did not cause a panic, but the card also did not function correctly. I was unable to get DHCP to work and if I switched the cards in and out of the cardbus more than twice (one insertion in each slot) the cards no longer loaded correctly. The netgear card also would refuse to load if inserted. (but I had inserted the atheros card in that slot previously, I did not test this behaviour with only the netgear card).
So I'm back on the old kernel again but I'm still willing to do any testing that might resolve this issue. I made absolutely sure I was using the new atheros modules and my source kernel was the april 17th preview tarball downloadable from the dragonfly snapshots section. Many thanks, Andrew
