Mandrake Cooker, kernel-2.6.8, and hostap...slow

[Praedor Atrebates]

As the subject indicates, I am running a current cooker (development) version 
of Mandrake on my laptop and have tried the 3rd Party builtin hostap_cs 
driver in kernel-2.6.8.1-2mdk (2.6.8 kernel variant).  I am finding that the 
rate on my card is locked at 2MB/s when using hostap.

I have an Orinoco Gold (Lucent) 802.11b wifi card for my laptop when at home.  
My desktop system, same distro,  to which I connect has a 802.11g card in it.  
When using the default orinoco_cs module, the default transfer rate is 
5.5MB/s.  Last night, I decided to give a shot to the hostap_cs driver 
provided now with the kernel as a 3rd Party addition.  It works fine except 
that the max/default rate is 2MB/s.  I used iwconfig to try to bump up the 
rate to 5, 6, or 11MB/s but nothing changed it from 2MB/s.  Unfortunately, I 
haven't been able to determine exactly what version of hostap is included in 
the current 2.6.8 kernels but I would presume it to be rather recent(?).

Is there a trick to getting the rate boosted upward?

praedor
-- 
"Our ship is in the hands of pilots who are steering directly under full sail 
for a rock.  The whole crew may see this course to violate our liberties in 
full view if they look the right way."
--Samuel Adams, 1771