Like I said, I can use the wireless card just fine in other operating systems if I reboot, so it's not hardware. I did give your solution a go, but no such luck.
The problem is that when the MAC address was randomly changed, it's given me an IP address assigned to the region near Marina del Rey, California. As it turns out, I'm in Tokyo, and probably my wireless router is not happy about talking to the wireless IP my computer insists to assign itself.
I've been trying to configure it all manually, since that way maybe I can assign myself a more reasonable IP address, and then if I later use wicd or NetworkManager it won't try to use the bad address. On accident I brought up wifi0 with no configurations, and you can see what it's doing
* Bringing up interface wifi0
* No configuration specified; defaulting to DHCP
* dhcp ...
* Running dhcpcd ...
wifi0: dhcpcd 4.0.2 starting
wifi0: broadcasting for a lease
wifi0: timed out
wifi0: probing for an IPV4LL address
wifi0: checking 169.254.62.179 is available on attached networks
wifi0: using IPv4LL address 169.254.62.179 [ ok ]
* received address
169.254.62.179/16
I'm not concerned if you have this IP, because this is the non-functional California IP that my computer continues to assign itself in Gentoo. Is there a way to reset my IPv4 LL address? Clearly the computer stored this IP address somewhere and it needs to be wiped, or replaced with something more suitable for this network.
~daid