Why am I all of the sudden getting a new hardware of PCMCIA MTD-002?

I'm just speculating here, but the bent pin could have caused all kinds of havoc (depending on which pins and what they were), and could have kept the PC Card controller or just the one slot from having been properly detected.  Now that it's fixed, it may be detecting the controller (or the specific slot) as PCMCIA MTD-002.  Or that could also be the designation for the Plug and play ID of the card.  Note, however, the card won't work without the correct driver installed, sometimes the driver must be installed before the card is inserted (sometimes for the 1st time), with other cards you install the card first and then the driver.

What card is it?

By the way, all of these cards, both 16-bit and 32-bit (which are also known as "cardbus" cards) are now correctly called "PC Cards" and not "PCMCIA Cards".  PCMCIA is the organization that sets the standards for the cards and owns the trademarks, and they have been trying to get people to stop referring to the cards as "PCMCIA" cards for almost a decade, but the PCMCIA terminology has been really "sticky".

Are you sure you are using the same pccard slot for the reader as you used before? If you have installed it to the 2nd pccard slot your system wouldn't recognize it as the same device, and try installing a new instance of it.

As to the correct PCCard slot.  There is only one.  The cards that are being attempted were working fine about 24 hours ago.  There has been an intermittant non-working issue which is why I found the bent pin.  The cards by the way are a Linksys PCM100 Ethernet adapter and a Linksys WPC54G.  Currently the WPC54G is not being recognized at all.  The PCM100 will be acknowledged by the laptop when slightly twisted.  That is when I get the PCMCIA MTD-002 device found.  The driver that was there and still there is a "Texas Instruments PCI-1211 Cardbus Controller".

Yes, i agree that there is a possibility of the bent pin causing and maybe still causing an issue.  Which pin was bent and not getting inserted into the card?  I'm not positive of the pin number but presuming the below example is true, then. The female connectors are on the left side.  The pin that was bent was the top row at the bottom of the card.

1                      34
35                    68

i.e. Pin 34.  No other pin was bent and it is now straight.

Unless someone has a better idea I guess it is the not sttraight enough pins then.  As indicated the two cards were working fine with no issues a week ago.  Thus it is not an incompatability issue or that I had to really force hard the card into the reader.  Then for the past week for no known reason there was intermittant connectivity.  I found that by puching the card along the guide quicker it would make connectioin.  Then yesterday there was a bent pin.  What I found when I was straightening the pin was that the reader had two loose screws.  I'm pretty sure that is what caused the card to be misalligned and thus bend the pin.  Not sure why it was only the one pin though.

It would seem that the card reader wouldn't be all that much to replace.  Too bad I can't get ahold of it at all.  Looks like I will have to take advantage of one of these $600 deals for a new laptop that is three times faster, eight times the memory and five times the hard drive space.  All at less than half of what I got this laptop for.  You just got to love Moore's Law.

The issue is not resolved but with no other answers offered I will have to accept that the straight pin that was bent is not straight enough.  

I've changed to USB adapters.