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Thanks, everyone, for your help so far. Here is the current situation:

Windows Server 2003, as far as I can tell, does not support the wireless cards that I have. I have confirmed this with Microsofts HCL and the Linksys and Cisco websites. I also emailed Linksys tech support, and they confirmed they do not support Server 2003 with the card I own.

I attempted to install Windows 2000 Pro on my laptop, but it did not recognize most of the hardware on my laptop (such as my ethernet port, video card, etc). I installed it in a partition next to Server 2003, and found that when I selected the option to boot into 2003 instead of 2000 I got all kinds of errors. I was not in the mood to troubleshoot this mess and reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled Server 2003 (leaving 2000 pro carefully on the shelf), and then proceeded to install Fedora Core 4 - my plan being now to see if I can at very least verify the hardware works using a different OS.

The linux installation went fine. Linksys even had instructions on their website for installing the linux-wlan-ng drivers for my 802.11b card. I installed the drivers, shut down, inserted the wireless card, rebooted, and the card was not recognized.

Using the cardctl command I attempted to acertain whether linux could at least see that I had inserted the card.

LInux was very explicit:
[root@hatman ~]# cardctl status 0
no card
[root@hatman ~]# cardctl status 1
no card

I installed drivers from madwifi.org for my cisco a/b/g card. Again, the installation went by the book. Shut down . . . insert card . . . breathe . . . pray really hard . . . .

Well, you can guess the result. My laptop still does not see my card. It recognizes that I have 2 PCMCIA slots, but steadfastly refused to recognized that I have inserted anything into them.

Have I missed something somewhere?

Is there a way to verify that the PCMCIA ports themselves are NOT the problem?

-- I just bought this laptop on ebay from someone who claims to have fully inspected it and verified the hardware is all functioning properly. He has good feedback, and I don't want to get into a dispute with him unless I am certain the ports are bad. I keep hoping this is a software problem, and would love to prove for certain whether it is hardware or software.