Yesterday I bought a D-Link "PCI Wireless Adapter" on sale for $50
(after stupid rebate). It comes as a PCMCIA card (uses the wi driver,
works fine when I plug it into a laptop), and a PCI card to plug it
into.

The PCI card is a bit strange. Although the kernel reports it as 

  cbb0 at pci0 dev 14 function 0: Ricoh 5C475 PCI-CardBus bridge (rev. 0x80)
  cbb0: interrupting at irq 10
  cardslot0 at cbb0 slot 0 flags 0
  cardbus0 at cardslot0: bus 0 device 0
  pcmcia0 at cardslot0

The socket on the card will only accept PCMCIA cards, not Cardbus. But
that's just idle curiousity...

The *really* odd part is that when it gets to the stage of probing the
PCMCIA card, I get this:

  wi0 at pcmcia0 function 0: D, Link DWL-650 11Mbps WLAN Card, Version 01.02
  wi0:wi0: init failed
  wi0: could not get mac address, attach failed
  wi0: failed to attach controller

I also tried plugging a 3Com 3C556B card in, resulting in:

  ep0 at pcmcia0 function 0: 3Com/Megahertz 3CCFEM556BI Ethernet/Modem
  ep0: wrote 0x7ff to TX_AVAIL_THRESH, read back 0x300. Interface disabled
  ep0: couldn't configure controller
  com3 at pcmcia0 function 1: serial device
  com3: ns8250 or ns16450, no fifo

The final bit of evidence - I booted Win2k on the same machine and
received similar results (the symptoms were a bit different, but
basically the cardbus bridge and the wireless card were both detected,
but no traffic would pass through the card and the config utility
reported that it couldn't lock onto any other station). *BUT*, when I
installed the special "PCI Holder Card" driver they inluded on CD,
suddenly everything started working (both the D-Link wireless card and
the 3Com card worked). I haven't yet figured out exactly what file
gets loaded for this, or how it works.

Anyway, I'm figuring this implementation of the bridge must be
crippled in some way. Has anybody seen anything similar? Any ideas?
If I could get this working, it would almost be worth the $50 just to
have a PCI->PCMCIA adapter (the manual says that you shouldn't plug in
anything but the D-Link card, but I ignored that and it seems to work
okay ;-)