We seem to have suffered a rash of WRT54G failures that only happened at certain locations and then vanished when the routers were moved to other locations.

What those locations had in common is that they were running other routers on channel minus 1 (20 MHz BW).  

It seems unbelievable, but I verified that if you bring a WRT54G router into range of a channel minus 1 system, the WRT54G/BBHN router will shut down and not boot up correctly until your take it out of range of the minus 1 signal.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it the LinkSys WiFi chip or the BBHN/OpenWRT firmware?

Ken - KE2N

I guess I should mention that the the ch -1 / 20 network also uses the "BroadbandHamnet" SSID in case that is relevant.

UPDATE:  this problem is caused by having the same SSID on the channel minus 1 nodes and the BBHN node.  You cannot boot up the Linksys node if the other nodes are in range.  But once you shut down the part 97 nodes the LinkSys returns to normal and you can change its SSID to something unique (or you can change the other system too).