solution to and explanation for router problems (Score 1)

programmers have a mentality that crashing is a horrible answer to a bug. In a previous lifetime I wrote router software professionally. When you develop routers you're usually under time pressure because the profit margins are very small and time to market is important. As a consequence bugs that are related to long uptimes are difficult to locate(lots of data flowing through, wedged hardware, memory leaks). The heart of the problem is the difficulty in the industry to get agreement between those who are time driven and those who are quality driven. If you're motivated by time to market you're going to put pressure on your engineering staff to cut quality, if you're motivated by quality you're going to put pressure on those who are time driven. I've met very few software engineers who are comfortable addressing out these balances in developing quality software. In my opinion the most beneficial technical mechanism is to create watchdogs that force reboots the router when things go wrong.

...long story short, since as a customer you don't have much say in how the software/hardware are developed. You do however have an option that fixes the vast majority of all problems - put your router on a christmas tree timer. In the middle of the night have your router (and cable box for that matter) power cycle for five minutes. I'll bet you'll be a much happier surfer