ralint rt61 not seen as wireless

I’ve spent ages trying to get this wireless card working on opensuse and i got it working then something happened, (what, I don’t know) now it doesn’t work again.

I’m not new to linux but i’ve not used it for a while and I’m very rusty. I am new to opensuse, however but i bought this wireless network card with the intention of running it on this tower pc with linux on it. Now i know the card works because it handles fine on the windows partition. Anyway I had no idea how to get started so i perused a few pages on the net on the subject, some which i found here and i compiled and installed the drivers then i installed the firmware (which i had to download seperately) I copied the firmware into /lib/firmware and into /etc/Wireless/RT61STA, then copied the rt6sta.dat into /etc/Wireless/RT61STA after converting it with dos2unix. i then copied the compiled .ko drivers into /lib/modules/yourkernelversion/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/

replacing the yourkernelversion with the name i got from uname

finally i:
insmod rt61.ko

then

modprobe rt61

i then tried

ifup ra0

and i got “no wireless extensions”

I started playing with yast2 and i configured it to use kNetworkManager which managed to find the wireless and connected but i had no internet. I figured this was a routing problem so i manually added toe gateway to me default route entry an tried again and i got some success. however when i tried to add the gateway to the /etc/sysconfig/network/route file and bring up the interface again it said something like “ip route change to 192.168.139.1/24 dev wlan0. Bad parameter” or some such error but the fauly was with the /24. I think it wanted a netmask of 255.255.255.255 or something.

Don’t ask me what I did after because i don’t know but it completely ballsed it up. wlan0 completely disapeared an yast kept complaaining that my ralink card wasn’t configured and it gave that warnibg about firmware again. now i have ni wireless, yast ses the card but not as a wireless and it won’t save the changes i make to it or let me delete it from the list. what can I do?

thanks

dmesg comes up with the following
rt61: module license ‘unspecified’ taints kernel.
RT61: Vendor = 0x1814, Product = 0x0301
rt61_ethtool_get_link
rt61_ethtool_get_link
rt61_ethtool_get_link
rt61_ethtool_get_link
rt61_ethtool_get_link
rt61_ethtool_get_link

please help.