After a few days without wireless figured I’d get down to trying to fix it. I’m not sure what happened with the kernel updates for 2.6.10.x and 2.6.12.x but I kept getting firmware errors in the dmesg log.

[4295079.175000] ipw2200: Firmware error detected.  Restarting.
[4295082.861000] ipw2200: Firmware error detected.  Restarting.
[4295086.139000] ipw2200: Firmware error detected.  Restarting.

I went to ipw2200.sourceforge.net to veify I had the latest version and to double check the configuration. So I grabbed the firmware for the version I was using and unzipped it to /lib/hotplug/firmware.

So far so good, wireless is back working and no more firmware errors in the dmesg log.