Airport Express no longer works in "Enterprise Arrangement" Long

Question

This is going to be somewhat long, so bear with me as I will try to be as detailed and complete as possible. I just was hung up on by Apple Technical Support after Michael waited until 6:01pm PDT so I could not call back, so any help would be appreciated.
I have three airport express base-stations that are arranged as follows:
1. Living Room - connects to my cable modem and iTunes to send music to the stereo.
2. Kitchen - extends the airport signal so that it covers the back yard and is connected to a USB printer.
3. Den - extends the airport signal to cover the bedrooms and is connected to iTunes for the den stereo.
The three units are connected via WDS in a very simple setup that took about five minutes to complete via Setup Assistant and some minor alterations in Airport Utility. The entire system functioned perfectly for over eight months until today when the Kitchen unit was no longer communicating to the printer and could not be accessed using Airport Utility. It would only "flash amber" after attempting numerous resets and even factory default resets. So, what to do -- thinking that the Airport unit had given up the ghost (I had one fail some time ago), I called apple support under my AppleCare plan.
The first representative (Chris) was very helpful and worked with me to try to reset the unit. When he could make no progress, I was passed along to a "product specialist," Michael, who tried very dilligently to explain from the beginning that my arrangement was far too complicated for basic support and that I had to buy an enterprise service contract in order to solve my problem. We spoke briefly and I assured him that I would accept whatever help that he could provide, as I felt that the particular base station had some malfunction.
We spent the better part of ninety minutes resetting the problematic (Kitchen)base-station to no avail. Finally he offered the following solution: "if all you want is to use it as a print server, we can set it up on it's own network." I said that that was not what I wanted, but thought we could try it as a possible workaround solution. After a few minutes of tinkering he had me set up a new network that only served as a print server. No longer did I get the range-expansion of my previous arrangement, and I have to switch the entire network from the airport menu in order to print. I can no longer print and surf the net or print and listen to music. He felt that this was an acceptable solution and tried to tell me that he and I "agreed to disagree" about this being a solution.
I explained to Michael that this was very "un-apple-like" in it's application and that there had to be something wrong with the base-station as it continues to "flash amber" rather than going to solid green. He reiterated his "agree to disagree" statement and said that my setup was too complicated for basic support. I offered to turn off the Den base-station to bring about an "acceptable level of support complexity." To this, Michael became very testy and proceeded to spend a minute or so explaining why I could not be helped and then hung up on me.
After being disconnected at 6:01pm PDT I then unplugged the Den base-station and simplified the system to what apple will support and still the problem persists: the Kitchen base-station will not join an existing network and run the USB printer at the same time. It can do one or the other, but when setup to do both, it consistently "flashes amber" and is inaccessible to Airport Utility - attempts to connect to the Kitchen base station through Airport Utility are met with the Spinning Beach Ball of Death and eventually with an error message : Airport Utility is unable to recognize the network.
I would appreciate any help or suggestions, but I'm afraid that I have an Airport Express paperweight.
I'll try again with Apple in the morning, also, but would like to solve this tonight if possible.
Thanks in advance,
Field
Powerbook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.7)   Airport Express 6.03

Answer 1

I called AppleCare this morning and Sean helped me out in a huge way. In all of my attempts, I had not done a factory-default reset on the main base station and apparently some sort of endless loop had occurred between those two stations. Sean was very helpful and patient with me, but now the system is working as promised. Moral of this story is if a factory default rest doesn't help on the "problem" base station, try resetting all of the units.