This is probably not an iputils issue but a firmware issue. You might cc the
ipw2200 maintainer to this bug. Also capturing traffic on wlan with tethereal
would be useful. 

Do you get any error messages from the kernel (either when you load the driver
or afterwards)?

Assigning to the kernel for the moment; it appears to be a driver issue.

IPW2200 should work just fine...I have test kernels w/ an update that will be 
in U4 here: 
 
   http://people.redhat.com/linville/kernels/rhel4/ 
 
Please give those a try and post the results here...thanks! 

Closer to the official release kernels: 
 
   http://people.redhat.com/~jbaron/rhel4/ 

Closed due to lack of response...please reopen when the requested info becomes 
available.  Thanks!