Atheros AR9285 wireless & F15

[Greg Woods]

I cannot get wireless to work on my new Sony VAIO VPCEG laptop. It has
the ar9285 chip in it. I am thinking this is a bug in the driver and
wondering what I should do about it. Before I file an official bug
report (with Fedora?), I want to know if anybody else has a machine with
this chip in it that is working. I'd like to rule out my own stupidity
first.

I can state the following:

1) There is a hardware wireless switch, and it is on
2) I have tried both 2.6.38 and 2.6.40 kernels.
3) I have tried the latest compat-wireless driver from kernel.org 
4) iwconfig can see the wlan0 device, but ifconfig does not.
5) Clicking wireless within NetworkManager:
   a) Airplane Mode shows as ON
   b) Wireless shows as unavailable
   c) Clicking wireless briefly turns it on and Disconnected, but then
it goes right back to Off/Unavailable
   d) Turning off Airplane Mode appears to work, but doesn't change
anything in c) above.
6) The wireless works fine in Windows 7

What is *really* frustrating about this is that it briefly worked a
couple of times. During the install, it showed a list of available
wireless networks and I chose mine, and entered the password. Then once,
after several reboots for various reasons, it actually came up and
worked, but as soon as I rebooted again, I was back to the same old same
old and it has not worked since.

Does this sound like a kernel driver bug or something stupid I did?
Would it make sense to file a bugzilla against the kernel? Any chance
this would work if I installed F14 instead of F15?

Obviously, without wireless, the laptop is a $600 paperweight.

--Greg