I did some googleing on what Udev really is and what it's supposed to do for you & this is the wiki-explananation of it:

"udev is the device manager for the Linux kernel. Primarily, it manages device nodes in /dev. It is the successor of devfs and hotplug, which means that it handles the /dev directory and all user space actions when adding/removing devices, including firmware load."

Now to my question.......

If udev loads firmware, why does it not assign my Atheros AR5001-cardmodule ath5k to something?

I checked during the boot of any installation from tty using lsmod & seeing that the module is indeed loaded, BUT it's not used by something.

/Kristoffer