Comment 98 for bug 498336

Confirmed that comment #86 worked for me to resolve the issue.

Was previously unable to communicate with an open (unencrypted) access point using my minPCI Orinoco card, despite being able to associate with a particular ESSID (similar to how about commenters describe).

dmesg was getting flooded with the previously mentioned "manual routing" message.

The security configuration of my AP did not seem to affect the problem.

Removing the agere_ap_fw.bin and agere_sta_fw.bin files from the /lib/firmware directory resolved the issue. I can now connect to the access point though the network manager applet, and I no longer see the "manual routing" message.