EA6500 - hangs every day, must power cycle

Question

I bought a EA6500 a few weeks ago, and so far this has been a terrible experience.
Physical setup
At home, I have a cable modem working as a bridge. No NATing, just a media conversion from Coax to RJ45 ethernet. Thus the EA6500 has an official IP on it's WAN interface.
Installation
On my first attempt to install it I had to give up after an hour. The fancy setup program on the CD never found the router, and I had some work to do. Thus, I reconnected my old router to get reconnected to the internet.
Five days ago I finally found the time to give it another go. Once again, the setup program on the CD had a hard time finding the router. When it finally found it, I could never finish the configuration routine. I supplied all the information needed, and the progress bar grew to 60% and then the setup program said it couldn't finish the install. This happened on every attempt. I disabled my antivirus and firewall, but no success. I tried to connect using a cable instead of WLAN - no success. It appears that the Setup program relies on WLAN only to get access to the router.
The first time I got a successful connection between my PC and the EA6500, the router asked me to download and install an updated firmware. This worked OK, even though the config was not 100% successful. Thus I guess the router is running the most current firmware. I can't verify this right now as I am at work.
After a while I tried to access the router's web interface directly without completing the setup program. This way, I was finally able to finish the router config and get access to the internet. During the web config the connection to internet came and went several times.
Use
After finishing the config, I downloaded the Smart WiFi app to my iPhone 4s and could connect to the router. This seem to work OK when I do have an internet connection. The problem is that the router freezes every day, sometimes 2-3 times a day and all internet connection is lost for my entire home network.
When this happens, all LAN lights kind of dim down without disappearing completely, and the router is nonresponsive. The link light on my cable modem (a bridge, not a router) dies, indicating that the link was lost. I have to use the power switch to turn the router off/on for it to wake up and resume it's work.
More often than not, the router has frozen when noone has used the network. As net use is usually limited to afternoons and evenings, the router is more often than not just idling when it freezes.
The router can not be said to be stressed or working hard. So far I have only used it to surf for news (2 iPads, 2 phones, three PCs) and stream a couple of movies using Netflix. No torrents or other connection intensive programs have been used. No USB-disks are attached.
What to do?
Can anyone give me a hint as to where I should start looking. I don't have the time for days of diagnostics work. If I can't get the router to work anytime soon I will return it and my more than 10 year long Linksys relationship is most likely over. Trust is a  fresh commodity, and my trust in Linksys is about to pass it's best before date due to several bad experiences the last year...

Answer 1

I believe your router is acting that way because the initial installation was not successful. I've had the same issue having a modem-router connected with my Linksys router. It is possible that even if your modem-router is already set to bridge mode, it is still using a Private IP (which is the WAN IP of the router). If the modem-router is using a Private IP, it will cause a conflict with the Private IP Address of the Linksys router. I would suggest you reset the router to factory defaults and reconfigure it manually by accessing the router page.
You check this link. You will need to agree and continue with an open network before you can open the Router password page.
If you have wireless dropping connection in your network, I suggest you check this link.
Hope this helps!