Following up on my own post about using WEP with the wi(4) driver with a 
Linksys card, I believe I've determined that the card does do hardware
encryption, and that its firmware is version 0.8, Variant 0.  This latter
discovery leeds me to the following question.  
In the driver code in /usr/src/sys/dev/ic/wi.c, see below,
ichiro@netbsd.org writes:

/*	$NetBSD: wi.c,v 1.29 2001/11/13 13:14:46 lukem Exp $	*/
			/*
			 * ONLY HWB3163 EVAL-CARD Firmware version
			 * less than 0.8 variant3
			 *
			 *   If promiscuous mode disable, Prism2 chip
			 *  does not work with WEP .
			 * It is under investigation for details.
			 * (ichiro@netbsd.org)
			 */

My question is: does this comment indicate that firmware 0.8 variant 3 and
above work with WEP, but that anything below variant 3 does not or vice
versa?

If variant 3 is required, is there a way to update the card with new
firmware?  (I've checked the linksys site, they don't list updates for this
card.)  Or, alternatively, has anyone figured out how to make this work?
-thanks
-Brian