I don't know if this issue is related, but I have a lot of trouble using my Cisco 350 card in promiscuous mode when using the airo-linux drivers that are supplied with the 2.4.19 or 2.4.20 kernels. I will lose my associatiation to an AP, and am unable to reassociate until I eject and insert my PCMCIA card.
I doubt the problem you are having is associated with libpcap, rather a driver bug with the kernel-supplied Cisco 350 drivers. You might want to take a look at the cisco.com drivers for your 350 card - they won't do RFMON, but they might do promiscous capture better.
http://www.cisco.com/cgi-bin/Software/WLAN/wlplanner.cgi (you will need a CCO login to access this page).
-Joshua Wright
Senior Network and Security Architect
Johnson & Wales University
Joshua.Wright@xxxxxxx
http://home.jwu.edu/jwright/
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> Before listing my problem I will let you know my
> configuration. I am using Cisco aironet 350 series
> card and the respective driver on red hat 8.0 with
> ethereal version 0.9.6 that comes with redhat 8.0.
...
> After ethereal is started it captures packet for few
> minutes. After that it disassociates with my Access
> point and try to associate with my university's AP.
> With in a second it again disassociates with
> university's AP and associates with my AP and then
> keeps flip-flopping between the two AP's every second.
> This problem does not exists if I use some other
> softwares like Iperf and Mgen. The problem is also
> when I use TcpDump. So I beleive the problem is with
> the libpcap library used by both of them. I even tried
> to update the libpcap library with latest version
> 0.7.1. But on installation this version gives a weird
> message saying that the version 0.6.x installed on my
> system is newer than version 0.7.1 that I am trying to
> install.