Comment 2 for bug 460323

some extra information to add. I have two rt2870 USB devices here. One is a Linksys WUSB600N (ID 1737:0071 Linksys) and the other is an Edimax ew7717UN (ID 7392:7717) which is slightly different than the device that ctsdownloads is using.

If I add the line "blacklist rt2870sta" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, neither of the devices appears to function. They see some networks, but not my own (which is wifi-n with WPA-PSK security) however they can not connect to any of these networks.

Blacklisting the "rt2800usb" module, however, allows both devices to function.

ctsdownloads: rt2800usb was brought into the 2.6.31 kernel (see http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges for a changelog, it's listed in section 14.3), so that may explain why it's now being identified as "wlan0" instead of "ra0". Although mine is showing ra0 while using rt2870sta - did you reboot after blacking the rt2800usb driver? Have you tried force removing it (sudo modprobe rt2800usb)?

Is it possible that it is just a matter of getting device IDs added to the newer rt2800usb driver? I remember that needed to be done when rt2870sta was included during the 9.04 alphas.