I've recently acquired one of these and thought it'd be fun to extend my current network to include a wireless network. And that's where the problems begin

The network topology is as follows:
(cable modem) <-> linux firewall (2 nics) <-> regular 100Mbit switch <-> wl-500g lan port
The regular switch is connected to several pc's.

To test the functionality of the wireless setup, I brought a laptop with an onboard Intel 2200BG and an additional asus wl-100g in case things went wrong.

My plan was to setup the wl-500g as an ethernet bridge (which is happily available from the system setup menu), but with this setting enabled, there is _no_ wireless activity at all.

So I switched to the default setup (home gateway). This instantly fired up the wireless network and my laptop managed to connect to it (open, wep encryption). However, that's where things stopped...at the time of writing, the packet count is 239 sent and 0 received. It shouldn't come as a surprise that I never received a dhcp-lease from the 500g, nor can I connect to anything on the lan if I set my laptop's wireless tcp/ip settings to a fixed ip.

From the router's point of view, my laptop's mac address does show up in the wireless associated stations list, but that's about it.
Wireless settings on the 500g are on auto wherever possible.

Now what?