I'm a gamer and an IT semi-pro (no certs yet). I too have a D-Link DI-524. A year or two ago my router stopped communicating with port 80 of the WAN link. No matter how many times I reset the router it wouldn't work. So I bought a Netgear superG with extended security (big mystake). It permanently blocks certain ports for all but the DMZ, so I bought another DI-524 which turned out to be a return that was repackaged and didn't work. So I brought out my old DI-524 and to my amazement, it worked perfectly fine. So that's the past history of my router in question.
I have 2 Dlink Gig switches (DGS-2205) chained and connected to one port on the router. Nothing else is plugged into the router except the WAN modem. I have one XP computer on the first switch. On the second switch, I have 1 win03 server, 1 Vista Ultimate 32bit, and a cisco hub with 1 XP, a powered off HP officejet all-in-one, and a Xerox Phaser 8500 in suspend. So total I have 2 XP's, 1 win03 server, 1 vista, 1 HP printer, and 1 Xerox printer.
Right now I can't test only the vista computer because I don't have long enough cables to do it with. When I was playing online games on my Vista machine, I kept getting dropped from the servers. I noticed that when the connection dropped, the lights on the switch were blinking with multicast packets, so I investigated. I thought that maybe since my switch was connected to the router with a straight instead of a crossover, it might be causing an instability. So I switched it to a crossover and thought everything was good. After a day or so, it started doing it again. So I came downstairs to replace the router with the junky Netgear I had in my drawer and noticed that the router was actually resetting itself. So I removed the cable that runs to my switch chain (with the vista computer) and it stopped resetting itself. I still have problems like wireless objects not being able to connect to some devices on the switch chain like the HP laserjet 4 printer when the vista computer is off. So I'm not totally convinced that Vista is the whole problem. I wonder if this problem with Vista is aparent in all the DI-524 routers? I wonder if throwing it in my drawer for a few months will solve this problem too, lol.
Just as I finished typing this, the router reset itself again. It seems that Vista only makes it reset faster, once per minute. It had been about 15-20 minutes since it reset the last time with the vista machine disconnected. Seems as though the router (at least mine) is the real problem.
