I ended up with the ASUS RT-N56U and installed it right out of the box and everything worked smoothly and more than twice as fast. The admin interface now just blinks right up and exponentially easier to configure than the old cisco. Although the only thing lacking is figuring out an easy way to create a vpn to lock down the network. I was able to configure the nat, static ip settings, ports and almost everything else in 10 mins.

I really didn't have time to experiment and test Tomato right away. Does it take a long time? is there a steep learning curb on getting it working correctly?

thanks again