Just to be clear:
For the carl9170 driver to work properly, the firmware and wireless-KERNEL extensions need to be loaded before the carl9170-modules-KERNEL extension is loaded.
This would normally be taken care of by the carl9170-modules-KERNEL dep file, but I am not sure that you have this file in your tce/optional folder.
For the wicd extension to work, both the dbus and wicd daemons need to be started and the carl9170-modules-KERNEL extension loaded before double-clicking on the wicd icon/running "wicd-gtk --no-tray".