Strange Wifi Issue

I am having a strange issue trying to get a wireless device working for a friend. The notebook is a vostro 1000. After spending several hours trying to configure the onboard dell wifi with ndis I finally gave up and had her purchase a USB 802.11 B. I recently set up a compaq with ndiswrapper and had no issues whatsoever. I did my research and had her get a Acer Warplink 802.11b with the prism2. It shows up in yast and is configurable but network manager ONLY sees the wired device. Let me back up here a second and add that everything I had done previously trying to install the ndis for the onboard card was undone. With that said, I am a huge vmware fan and for my friend she uses opensuse 10.3 about 95% of the time. I have a VM of XP so that she can run certain programs. I currently have the wireless USB working on the VM of XP but can't get the d*** thing to work with Opensuse. Am I making any sense? Anyway, was hoping somebody had some input.

UPDATE:

Some more information. The green light powers on and the device appears in KNetworkManager but is shaded I assume because it isn't actually connected to a network. No matter what configuration I try through YaSt I still cannot get the device to sniff out any networks to connect to and it won't connect to my Network even if I statically configure the device.

If I do an lsusb the device shows up.
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0967:0204 Acer (??) WarpLink 802.11b Adapter --- here it is.
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 045e:008c Microsoft Corp. Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 03f0:0f11 Hewlett-Packard
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 058f:9361 Alcor Micro Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

KNetworkManager does give me the option to enable/disable wirless. This seems odd. The compaq notebook I configured with ndswrapper a few months ago didn't require me to do any adjustments once I installed the driver and the green light came on. The available networks were shown and I didn't have to make any adjustments through yast. The wireless device connected much like it would through windows.

Back to the problem at hand. Am I missing something or is it possible this wireless USB stick isn't going to work under linux?