Wifi Failure

[casual]

I have a Ralink 5370 which connects directly to my Pi. I installed it using the directions mentioned in the wiki. Problems ensued:

Mostly it fails to start when the Pi boots: 70% of the time
When it does start, it fails to connect to the network: 20% of the time
When it does connect to the network, it drops the connection in under a minute. 5% of the time

And yes it does connect correctly the rest of the 5% but that is a pretty low success rate. I do not want to turn the Pi on and off 20 times before I finally am able to get a stable connection going. I've been trying to fix it for the past 2 days and have come up with very little.

I would really appreciate any help!

[obcd]

I also have 2 wifi adapters with that chipset.
To my suprise, they didn't work either when I connected them directly to my Pi.
So, I took one of them with me to work. To my even bigger suprise, it worked there.

The access point at home is a linksys with dd-wrt firmware. The one at work is having Tomato firmware. At home, Mac filtering is enabled, but the wifi stick is in the list. The one at home is using wep encryption, the one at work wpa.
The Pi is different. I tried 2 different Pi's at home. One has the usb Polyfuses bridged with higher current versions (and the main Polyfuse as well). The other had 0 ohm resistors instead of the Polyfuses. (Also a higher rated main Polyfuse)
I will try this evening with the working setup to see what might cause the problems.
Connecting the wifi stick to a powered hub at home also fixed the issue. Maybe the stick is radiating 2 much rf into the Pi. This still doesn't explain why everything is fine at work.
I used the same OS image. The supplies are also different, but they all come from RS components and deliver the proper voltage. (Same brand and type)

[obcd]

It seems like the wifi stick is recognised fine, but it's having problems to obtain a dhcp from the router.
Sometimes it succeeds after a couple of sudo ifup wlan2. TP1-TP2 is 4.97V, so that seems fine.

[casual]

I was thinking that mb it was the power saving mode on the wifi module that was causing the module to go to sleep if it was unable to find a connection. So I turned off the power saving by doing

sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off

and apparently it has been working till now but I've only restarted it three times. Lets see if it works in the long run.

[obcd]

You can also add
wireless-power off
to the wlan section of /etc/network/interfaces