Adding new mac mini to network causing problems

Hello,
I have a small home network that has been working great, and just bought a mac mini for media purposes. Unfortunately, adding the mini has ruined my network performance, and I don't understand why.
Previous Setup:
- airport extreme (firmware 7.4.2)
- 2 macbook pros using wireless (leopard & snow leopard)
- airport express only used to make a printer accessible wirelessly (6.3, "join a wireless network")
- iPhone
that worked great, but one of the macbook pros was doing double duty as media and work computer. Also, there was no nice way to do time machine backups without physically plugging in a USB HD. I was using USB into airport extreme, but that is not supported and never worked well for me (though it seems to work for others).
So, I bought a mac mini in Oct' 2009 (immediately after small upgrades were announced).
New setup:
- airport extreme
- mac mini using ethernet cable to airport extreme (USB HD shared for macbook pros to do wireless time machine backups) mac mini running snow leopard
- 2 macbook pros as before
- airport express serving printer as before
- iPhone
Problems:
- very slow wireless (skype is unusable)
- dropping wireless connections a lot (disassociating with XXX (reserve 2) message)
I tried turning off everything for a few min and trying again with the mac mini unplugged (eg. previous setup). Everything worked great, Skype 2 way video was fine. Then I plugged in the mini, and again I have the same problems.
It's frustrating because everything is made by Apple, and I bought the **** mac mini partially because the airport extreme-USB HD solution (eg. mimicking a time capsule) is not officially supported.
It seems like there is some weird interference being caused by the mini. It's not a wireless issue (b/c it's plugged in), but maybe it's a DHCP problem.
Also, I can't find where one sets the maximum number of DHCP leases that the airport extreme will offer. I seem to remember that setting, and thought that might be the problem, but I can't find it now.

For those that might find this thread:
- moving the mini and the airport extreme about 18 inches apart helped some, will monitor this.
here's a couple useful articles about the interference issues in general:
http://www.macgeekery.com/hacks/hardware/optimizingairportconnectivity
http://www.macworld.com/article/60801/2007/11/dec07mobilemac.html
I can't turn off bluetooth b/c that's the mini's keyboard and mouse. I tried to move to the 5GHz band for the wireless... which seems to work pretty well for the macbook pros, but the airport express I have (for printing) won't support that so it's a no-go solution for now (unless I spend even more money for one of the new ones).
Seems odd that the mini and airport extreme which look like they were designed to be stacked on top of each other, actually don't work well that way.

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Hi John,
My ISP is PlusNet and there are 2 Windows XP PCs, a Windows 2003 Server, 2 Windows 2003 virtual servers, an HP printer, a DLink Wireless Access Point and a Linksys NSLU2 NAS box all working perfectly happily here - the Mac is the only machine that doesn't want to play.
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In addition it's all NATted so the ISP could only block my external IP address - they don't have access to the router config and in any case all the other devices are communicating with the Internet over the ADSL link with no problems so I think I can rule out the ISP doing anything nasty.
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