Oh Boy....am I ever embarrassed.
I spent hours looking for
drivers, contacting the manufacturer, and wasting the great people's time that took the time to reply to this thread.
I had a yellow
? in my device manager (XP PRO SP2) but never thought to plug anything into the 2.0 adapter.

Sure enough, as soon as I plug a USB device into the cardbus adapter the familiar windows sound beeped and when I checked the device manager all was well and the adapter was working fine at 2.0
It's times like these that I really feel like a ditz
Thank you
all very much for your time and help.
Diana.