Okay, thanks.  I was just curious if there was a particular problem you were trying to fix by flashing.  I subscribe to the "if-it-aint-broke-don't-fix-it" philosophy, but there were several issues with the Linksys firmware I wasn't happy with.  (My WRT54G is 1-1/2 yrs old, so i don't know how different the most recent firmware versions may be.)  I tried all the official firmware versions that were available at the time, but it was a breath of fresh air when I switched to using non-Linksys, open source firmware.

I switched to the wifi-box firmware (sourceforge.net) and finally got proper PPTP VPN passthrough--the official Linksys versions never seemed to handle the GRE 47 protocol reliably.  With VPN passthrough that actually works, I can access my home LAN from any internet connection anywhere using just what's built into Win2000/XP, without requiring additional hardware or software.  That's very handy when I'm out in the field somewhere and need to grab a file from my home computer.

Open source firmware also adds features I didn't find in any of the official versions I looked at.  It added advanced wireless options like antenna power, a bigger wireless MAC filter list, and even a one-tunnel VPN server.  (The VPN server actually seems to work, though I'm not using it since I'm using a Win2000 machine as my VPN server.)  Ironically, I also have a BEFVP41, one of Linksys's official VPN routers, but I've never managed to get the VPN part of it to work.

Another very useful feature of the wifi-box firmware is what they call "static DHCP", which combines the best parts of static IPs and DHCP-assigned IPs.  With this feature, you let the router act as DHCP server, but can designate what IP you want it to assign to specific MAC addresses.  Sure, you can always assign static IPs with a regular router, but then you also have to manually assign the rest of the numbers (gateway, DNS servers), and you have to configure each machine.  This static-DHCP concept allows you to manage IPs in the router and lets the machines still pick up the other numbers from the DHCP server.

Why do I even need static IPs?  Because to have port forwarding work (e.g., to use one machine as a VPN server) you need the machine to get a known, unchanging IP.  And to use network printservers, you need the printserver to get a known, unchanging IP.  On my home LAN the printers are not physically connected to computers, they are directly connected to the network via inexpensive D-Link DP301U and Hawking HP1SP "pocket printservers".