Let me give a brief background:

1) I have two laptops.  One runs SuSE10.0 Eval, the other OpenSuSE 10.0.  The SuSE10.0 Eval is an ACER 3003WLMi, the OpenSuSE 10.0 is an IBM T40 Thinkpad.  The ACER has a Broadcomm wireless card that I use ndiswrapper-1.7 with, the Thinkpad has an Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter that I use the ipw2100-1.3 drivers and ipw2100 module with.
2) kernel version: 2.6.13-15.8-default on both.
3) Wireless packages:
    wireless-tools-28pre8-16
    wpa_supplicant-0.4.4-2
4) Here's the deal.  I have a wireless network running WPA PSK with AES.  I use YaST to set up the ACER, no problems.  When I setup the Thinkpad, problems.  The wireless connection can't authenticate.  It's in an infinite loop when trying to authenticate.  I ran some of the wpa_supplicant debug features to see that it kept trying to authenticate, but couldn't.  I tracked down the differences between the two installations by comparing the /var/run/wpa_supplicant-eth1.config file between the two and found that the Thinkpad had this extra spec:

ap_scan=2

The ACER setup did not have this line.  I changed it to ap_scan=1 on the Thinkpad and ran "wpa_cli reconfigure eth1" which effectively re-read the new config file and it authenticated.  I repeated the setup on the Thinkpad (using YaST) and this time I deleted the ap_scan line from the wpa_supplicant config file and ran wpa_cli again with reconfigure.  Again, it worked.  The only difference between the ACER setup and the Thinkpad is this extra line in this config file.  What I don't understand, is why /etc/sysconfig/network/scripts/ifup-wireless would create two slightly different versions of the wpa_supplicant config file.  I haven't dug into ifup-wireless just yet to find out, so I thought I would report it here.  The quick fix for now was to add:

WIRELESS_AP_SCANMODE='1'

to my ifcfg-wlan-bus-<.......> file for this interface on my Thinkpad.  This fixes the problem, but I'm still confused as to why things are setup differently between the two and if this is a real bug with the setup.  Thanks.