Intel WIFI 5300 AGN Unknown error 132

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Recently I started having problems with my Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 5300 AGN card.  It simply quit working after I did a kernel upgrade.  It was giving errors like “Unknown error 132”, and “deauthenticated (Reason: 9)”.  The hardware switch did not seem to affect it, and the errors were the same whether I had the switch on, or off; so I’m assuming it had to do with the hardware not being initialized properly when the module loaded.

I’m using gentoo linux, and I had previously been using kernel “2.6.30-gentoo-r5”.  when I upgraded to “2.6.31-gentoo-r6”, my system started having trouble with the Intel Wifi.  I was getting errors like the following.

tdanotebook ~ # /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 restart
* Stopping wlan0
*   Bringing down wlan0
*     Shutting down wlan0 ...                                    [ ok ]
*     Stopping wpa_cli on wlan0 ...                              [ ok ]
*     Stopping wpa_supplicant on wlan0 ...                       [ ok ]
* Starting wlan0
RTNETLINK answers: Unknown error 132
RTNETLINK answers: Unknown error 132
*   Starting wpa_supplicant on wlan0 ...                         [ ok ]
*   Starting wpa_cli on wlan0 ...                                [ ok ]
*     Backgrounding ...

/var/log/messages
Dec 20 15:20:04 tdanotebook kernel: wlan0: direct probe to AP 00:1f:f3:c3:88:b4 try 1
Dec 20 15:20:04 tdanotebook kernel: wlan0 direct probe responded
Dec 20 15:20:04 tdanotebook kernel: wlan0: authenticate with AP 00:1f:f3:c3:88:b4
Dec 20 15:20:04 tdanotebook kernel: wlan0: authenticated
Dec 20 15:20:04 tdanotebook kernel: wlan0: associate with AP 00:1f:f3:c3:88:b4
Dec 20 15:20:05 tdanotebook kernel: wlan0: associate with AP 00:1f:f3:c3:88:b4
Dec 20 15:20:05 tdanotebook kernel: wlan0: deauthenticated (Reason: 9)
Dec 20 15:20:05 tdanotebook kernel: wlan0: deauthenticating by local choice (reason=3)

So, I decided to try the latest unmasked vanilla kernel “2.6.31.6”, and everything just started working.