USB wireless key won't connect to network at boot up

[emonette123]

I was wondering why I always had to manually reconnect to my wireless network at each boot up. I am using a hard drive installation and a Trendnet TEW-424UB USB wireless key with ndiswrapper driver to connect to my wireless network.

wlan0 is always set up properly at each boot up. I dug my way through the initialization sequence and ended up looking at /usr/local/simple_network_setup/rc.network batch file. Calling the batch anew after boot up would work fine, but it didn't work during boot up. At boot up, the iwlist wlan0 scan command was not finding anything. On the second call to the batch file, it would correctly list my network. So I looked at which command woke up my USB wireless key and found out it was

iwconfig wlan0 essid "mynetworkname"

I found 2 solutions:

1) calling
iwconfig wlan0 essid any
twice prior to listing the networks

2) calling
iwconfig wlan0 essid "SomeDummyValue"
once prior to listing the networks

It looks like, after a power down, the USB key is not in the state where essid is at any/off while wlan0 thinks it is. Calling the iwconfig wlan0 essid correctly set the state of the USB key. Or it is something else and I was just lucky, I really am not a pro about that!