Trouble with wireless switch (rfkill) and wireless connectivity.

Hello, this is my first message in this community so please bare with me if this message should be in the newbie part; but I think it's better fitted here. Other than that, I'm glad to be here .
After quite some time in Fedora I'm coming to Arch and I must say I'm delighted, so I wanted to use it in my laptop too which was running an old version of Fedora.
The laptop is an Airis N930 (about 5 years old) with a RaLink RT2500 wireless adapter which worked well in Fedora 11 but I'm having some trouble getting it to work in Arch. The problem is that the connectivity switch in this laptop is kind of a software one: in Windows it's compulsory to have a program which came in the drivers disk so that when that button is pressed (think of it as another key in the keyboard) the wireless connectivity is turned on and the indicator led lights up.
For a Linux based system there's no such program (I think) but the behaviour seems to be different in newer and older systems (I've tried Fedora and Ubuntu recent live environments and the behaviour is the same as in Arch). In Fedora 11 it just works everything's unblocked by default, in Arch the hardware block seems to be on and I don't know of any way to unblock it:
root@laptop ~ $ ifconfig wlan0 up
SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not possible due to RF-kill
root@laptop ~ $ rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
root@laptop ~ $ rfkill event unblock phy0
1298671843.804446: idx 0 type 1 op 0 soft 0 hard 1
Pressing the wireless connectivity button doesn't produce any event... Does anyone know what can I try or how to remove the hard block? Could it be related to newer kernels?
Thank you very much for your time, any fixes, workarounds or ideas are welcomed.

Thank you for your tips lamegaptop. I already have linux-firmware installed and I'm using the supported kernel module for the card (it's a PCI one):
06:01.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2500 802.11g (rev 01)
Loaded modules for it:
rt2500pci 12420 0
rt2x00pci 3890 1 rt2500pci
rt2x00lib 24866 2 rt2500pci,rt2x00pci
mac80211 178404 2 rt2x00pci,rt2x00lib
cfg80211 120337 2 rt2x00lib,mac80211
eeprom_93cx6 1004 1 rt2500pci
Rfkill is installed too, the output I posted in the first post belongs to the commands I entered in the Arch system. In Fedora rfkill always reports both blocks to be off.
As the Fedora system is running a 2.6.30.10 kernel I tried to run some tests using the LTS kernel (it's a 2.6.32.X right now) in the Archboot live environment, the output of "rfkill list" changed as seen below:
$ rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
$ rfkill iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:on
$ ifconfig
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:264 (264.0 b) TX bytes:264 (264.0 b)
$ ifconfig wlan0 up
$ ifconfig
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:264 (264.0 b) TX bytes:264 (264.0 b)
$ rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
$ ifconfig wlan0 up
SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not possible due to RF-kill
This behaviour was the same when running the default Arch kernel in Archboot. I'm thinking in extracting the kernel configuration from the Fedora kernel and use it to build a new one and see if it helps, although I'm not sure where the problem may be.

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