EA4500: poor performance as Master Browser - how to disable or make it work?

Question

I have EA4500 acting as a router on domainless all-Windows network of two XP machines.
Unfortunately, EA4500 aggressively grabs the role of the Master Browser (I am talking about Computer Browser Service) on the network (regardless in which order you power the devices up) and then doesn't serve as a working Master Browser - both Windows machines stop listing the network computers in the "Network Neighborhood" and incur massive timeouts when attempting to view the listing.
A quick look with 'browstat.exe status' reveals that indeed the router has announced itself as a Master Browser device, but returns errors when you query it.
Quite predictably, without the router, both machinces figure out amongst each other who will be the Master Browser and everything works fine. The problems begin only when you add the router to the network.
Hence the questions:
1) Is there any way to make EA4500 work like a full-blown Master Browser (the one that not only announces itself, but also serves as such)? That would be really nice, as having a Master Browser integrated in "always-on" router would really improve the predictability of the network.
2) If not, is there any way to disable the Master Browser on EA4500? For now I managed to achieve that by assigning the router to different workgroup name, but this is lame, as I now can't connect a disk storage to the router and use it within the same workgroup.

Answer 1

I have the same problem.
I also tried bridge mode, but this case all functions are disabled, so the smart part is useless.... and still samba is running and messing up the whole network.
I checked the firmware, seems SSH included in the kernel, is it possible to ssh into the EA4500 and modificate the samba config file????