WRT610N v1 connection issues, media center and internet

Question

Good evening. I am having a connection issue with my wireless/wired connection and am wondering if anyone else has had the issue.
I am running the following
WRT610N V1
Firmware Version: 1.00.03 B15
Windows 7 Enterprise Edition
I have an Xfxforce 780i motherboard with onboard dual 1gb nics plugged into the router.
I am also using an Xbox 360 Wireless N device.
The issue i have been having recently are two, both seem to be router related.  Sometimes while gaming or on the web I will losing connection to my gateway. I have both of my nic mac addressed reserved in the router.  On my windows 7 machine the internet connection will stop working and I will have to repair the connection. 
The issue i have been experiencing with my Xbox 360 is sever choppiness while streaming recorded tv shows over my network
For the most part while I am streaming the video's i am doing nothing else, it should be noted that i can watch the vidoes on the PC without an issue so the issue shouldn't be pc related.  I initally though maybe resource related but the vidoes run fine on the pc.  Restarting has no effect.
I did do a hard reset on my router but that did not solve the issue.  The issue is semi random but the frequence is fairly higher.  Sometimes I will get through a full show or two and sometimes the quality of the steam will be horried. Where pausing and restarting won't do anything.
I have used a direct wired connection and I still get the video degredation so I believe the issue is my access point.
For the price that i paid for this unit, $200 - yes i did say 200 as it is a V1 model and i got it when they came out, this is one of the worst issue I have ever had.  
I am going to test a netgear 54g tomorrow night to see what experience I get.
I did some poking on the forum here and I noticed others have had some degredation issue but nothing seem to solve it even though their threads are marked as solved.  I have tried turning off windows 7 firewall and disabling my AV to make sure those weren't the issue, which they aren't.
It should be noticed that my machine is the following and I am fairly sure the issue isn't pc hardware related.
win7 pro
xfx force 780i 
intel e8500 dc 3.16
evga nvida 9800 gtx ssc
seagate dual 250gb raid 0 hard drive
4gb g.skill pc8500 ram.
I am adding more ram later this weekend to take it to 8gb and a new 1tb drive to transfer my media center data too. I do not believe this will fix my issue since the only issue I can see is the Linksys router.
thoughts?

Answer 1

Try these things, in this order:
1. Disable Home Defender. 
If that does not work, try
2. Reducing MTU to 1300 (recommended by someone else on here for a throughput issue). This may not be relevant to you, but it doesn't hurt to try. MTU settings don't generally apply to in-network connections. But who knows what's what when it comes to this router.
3. Disable Upnp. Some people, like myself find this setting necessary - but you may want to just go ahead and disable to see if that helps.
4. You need to remove the name of the competing product (that router) from your post. I got banned from the forum for a few days for mentioning that I was using so and so router for the time being. Do it before the post is deleted or you're banned. 
Good Luck. Let us know if anything here fixes your problem.
Remember that you'll need to give the router 'time' with each fix separately. Don't  do all 3 things. Do 1 at a time and give the router a few days, to feel out if the solution works or not.
Good Luck.