Comment 74 for bug 300693

I had this problem (albeit on a Gentoo system), and eventually fixed it by upgrading to a more recent kernel that had the ath5k driver.

One thing though: even with ath5k, this problem still reoccurred, and it was because I had old modules from madwifi installed. Modules like ath_hal and ath_pci were still autoloading (even though I hadn't compiled/installed madwifi on the current kernel (2.6.30)). Make uninstalling madwifi (was an install from svn) fixed it all for me.

Hope this helps someone.