PCMCIA (DLink dwl-g650) recognized by xp only as "PCI device"

I have two DWL-g650 cards and both are recognized by XP only as "PCI device". When I try to install drivers (even though these are official drivers from dlink website), XP will say "The specified location does not contain information about your hardware". I even reformatted and installed a different version of xp sp3. Still the same. I tried a different laptop - the same. I know that both of these cards were ok before, but they got this way when I tried to change the driver to version 2.54 (from 3.05 beta which was giving me BSODs). Now even trying the 3.05beta drivers I can't get xp to recognize the cards.
Is there some sort of firmware in the cards that holds some type of device id or info used by os pnp to recognize it? Is there a way to edit it? Maybe it's something else altogether? Any help appreciated