Netgear WNR1000 issues

Where to start...

I picked up one of these things November 27th last year (mainly because it was 40 dollars) and it as working fine for about a month besides random Wireless drops (which might have been a sign to just return the thing then anyway, but I ignored it). It is a Wireless N router that says It can do 150Mbps (although Won't go any faster than 65 because there's 18 other access points around me, checked with inSSIDer) and averaged around 6MB/s file transfers between my laptop and desktop which is hard wired to it.

Now, since about the 2nd or 3rd of the year, for whatever reason, it seems that the wireless itself is dead, or at least dying, where I've been dropped multiple times in a minute at most frequent, and its stayed connected for at most 12-13 hours before Its dropped me off. It's really random in when it chooses to do this, and I can't seem to find any pattern.

At times, the signal strength (per the system icon in Windows 7) says 4/5 bars, even though my laptop is sitting within a foot of the router, and inSSIDer has actually shown it dropping off. Even my PSP has shown it as low as 10% once, and that's within 5 feet. Transfers between my desktop and laptop hover between 100KB/s and 2MB/s, either between the 100KB/s and 600KB/s or 1MB and 2.

I've gone through as many steps as I can think of (reinstalling my wireless card driver, which is an Intel 5100 AGN) which didn't fix anything, reset the router settings, reflashed the damn thing twice, and gone through just about every wireless setting in its control panel, and the only thing that's keeping it stable is limiting the transfer speed to 65Mbps. I'm still only getting ~1MB/s transfers though, and I'm using a channel none of the other 18 access points are on.

So, any ideas? I'm thinking of just sending it back to Netgear since its past the return policy of our store, but I don't feel like exactly bothering with that, but I will if I have to >_>

TIA, if I even get any replies that is.