I confirm the bug on my laptop, equipped with AR9285 (module ath9k) wireless chip.
the laptop (samsung N220 netbook) has a fairly clean debian testing installation, after kernel upgrade from 3.1.0-1-686-pae to 3.2.0-1-686-pae connection to a wifi router with WEP encryption (*) does not work anymore. i can setup the interface with manual ifconfig / iwconfig commands, no errors are reported, some wireless functionality is present, for example running "iwlist wlan0 scan" gives me router wifi channel, executing 'iwconfig wlan0' shows me the wifi interface is associated with the router, so everything seems correct. But no packets are transmitted nor received over the wireless link. I have manually installed the older 3.1.0-2 kernel (vmlinuz, initrd, /lib/modules/3.1.0-1-686-pae stuff) , added a menu entry in grub, rebooting the laptop with the older kernel fixes the problem, the wifi network works as it used to do before the kernel upgrade. --- .(*) i know , wep is broken and flawed and should be avoided, i know the risk, and the environment where i use this old router is safe enough the router does not support newer protocols (WPA) and i dont want to spend money :-)
