That is very interesting actually. It also seems to spell out my issue. On that router dd-wrt seems to have an issue due to either CPU load or being unable to support FAST NAT.
Very interesting. Geeze... I honestly never though my fairly state of the art router would have been an issue.
I can't rememebr why I had switched off of merlins build in the first place, probably just because I had used dd-wrt and had been comfortable with it in the past. Either way, all of the functions that I use my router for as there so I am hoping this is the ideal solution. :)