wpa supplicant causes large timeouts

Seen on an IBM Thinkpad T41 (x86). lspci says I have an "Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)" (ID 168c:1014) and the module ath5k is loaded, from linux-image-2.6.31-17-generic 2.6.31-17.54. There are no activities that trigger it for me ("host www.google.com" usually completes instantly) but I can see in syslog every 2 minutes exactly there is a CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS line, and simultaneously any traffic I'm sending/receiving (such as ssh keystrokes or a pulseaudio stream) will be buffered, and appear after 2 to 5 seconds. It seems that even on UDP (nc -u) traffic is not lost, only delayed.

Same bug here. It's completely annoying when making voip calls or playing FPS games. I did some research on this problem:
Exact every 2 minutes in syslog I get "wpa_supplicant[1112]: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS" and exactly in this moment all my wireless traffic if "paused" for 5-6 seconds, if I run constant ping on my access point I get:
64 bytes from 10.0.2.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=0.540 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.2.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=0.561 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.2.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=6442 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.2.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=5442 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.2.1: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=4443 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.2.1: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=3443 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.2.1: icmp_seq=13 ttl=64 time=2445 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.2.1: icmp_seq=14 ttl=64 time=1446 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.2.1: icmp_seq=15 ttl=64 time=447 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.2.1: icmp_seq=16 ttl=64 time=0.496 ms
The same thing will happen if I run in console:
# iwlist wlan0 scan

So the I think the problem is in NetworkManager or nm-applet are running scan every two minutes, not in wpa_supplicant itself.

Ifound a workaround:
1. stop NetworkManager (/etc/init.d/network-manager stop)
2. write your wireless config for wpa_supplicant (my is simple I have open wireless network without password)
3. run wpa_supplicant (wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf)
4. get IP (dhclient3 wlan0)

I'm using ThinkPad X60 with
Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)

Looks like this problem have been discussed before https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/373680

Hello everyone. The original problem that I reported seems to have a different origin, see:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bind9/+bug/504963

My wifi chipset is:
0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)

while all of the people above seem to have Atheros. I propose to close this bug and refer the people with Atheros cards to the thread given by Troex above.