Routers are the best option I admit, but its not dumb luck I've had, its because I actually spend the time to set these things up rather then clicking the big button saying "OMG CLICK HERE FOR DEFAULT SETTINGS WHICH NEVER WORK BECAUSE NO COMPUTER IS PERFECT!". If you do just go for defult settings its bound not to work.

However if you make the effort to go through each and every option and also make the effort to turn off the crap features (such as privacy control and e-mail filtering) its a damn'd good piece of software. Just because most people don't take the time to actually install their software properly doesn't mean its the softwares fault.

And the non-connect issue is something called 'script-blocking', kill that and usually everythings fine.