I'll probably be shot by somebody for being a noob but I'm going to go for it anyway.

I pop in the live cd, BT3 loads up without much fuss...I run kismet and I don't see anything on there as I should be seeing wireless access points in the area.

I have a Belkin F5D8001 pci card. *flame/noob/bullet proof suit on*

I still haven't been able to figure this out.
Any leads? Suggestions?

BTW I got this problem fixed. I was rebooting into the live cd from a Windows restart. I'm assuming the reboot kept the wireless card active and it caused problems once backtrack started. So I shut the PC down completely and booted straight into backtrack and all was well.