ok, this is what I found... booted c3100 with OZ 3.5.4.1 w/o the wifi card in it. did "lsmod" and no kernel modules loaded to drive it. Inserted card and waited a little while and it loaded both hostap and orinoco/hermes drivers!
No wonder things were confused.
I checked "cardctl info" details with the files in /etc/pcmcia and the IDs were only listed in the hostap configuration file, so was baffled.
In the end I simply forced deinstall of the orinoco/orinoco_cs/hermes/spectrum24 modules ignoring dependences, so that it didn't remove anything else (this after ejecting the card with "cardctl eject X" - X is card number from cardctl info).
Now, it only loads hostap, and I can fire up wpa_supplicant (added " post-up" line in the /etc/network/interfaces file).
I'm sure a real OZ boffin can tell me what I should have done to prevent orinoco/hermes driver from being loaded; I had similar problems using Ubuntu when I briefly used it before going back to SuSE!