Comment 2 for bug 306719

>My initial suspicion is that madwifi attempts to initialize the RF MAC, fails, and leaves the HW in a state that the ath5k driver cannot recover from when next it is loaded.

Tim, from what I can see, ath5k is not on the machine by default and attempting to install linux-backports-modules-jaunty-generic complains that it depends on "linux-backports-modules-2.6.28-4-generic" which is not available.

modprobe also complains that ath5k is not installed

# modprobe ath5k
FATAL: Module ath5k not found.

>The proposed solution is to remove madwifi from Jaunty LRM and make it a DKMS package.

I did not install madwifi on the machine and it does not come with ubuntu as far as I know. I attempted to download madwifi from universe repository and got the following error:

# apt-get install madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3698
Package madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3698 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3698 has no installation candidate

I will test compiling http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gz myself.