Comment 87 for bug 339891

Dries, thank you for your suggestions (and all the other work on this thread). I seem to be back in business now, but with an unpatched 2.1.2.0 from:

http://www.ralinktech.com.tw/data/drivers/2009_0521_RT2860_Linux_STA_V2.1.2.0.tgz

The only thing I modified on this driver were the two lines in os/linux/config.mk:
HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y
HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y

I did NOT apply the patch that is moving upstream per this bug to the 2.1.2.0 sources I downloaded from Ralink. BTW there are significant other differences between the debian 1.8.0.0 sources and the 2.1.2.0 sources from Ralink.

I had previously removed the rt2860-dkms package and the Jaunty supplied driver when I was having problems, and to the best of my knowledge was running the 1.8.0.0-3 debian rt2860-source package with the patch to common/cmm_wpa.c. I had *never* been successful in connecting to WPA2 with any Jaunty builds (starting with Alpha 3) with the Ubuntu supplied driver, but with the debian sources compiled with the patch I could connect, but had the intermittent problems described (same symptoms as the total inability to connect with the default driver).

So in summary it appears that the stock 2.1.2.0 sources from Ralink compiled with supplicant support have proper WPA2 support without the proposed patch. Furthermore the patch applied to 1.8.0.0 did help but did NOT provide reliable WPA2 support in my situation (D-Link DIR-655, mixed 802.11n & g, WPA2 Only - Personal).

Hopefully this will all get sorted out and included in future Jaunty updates.