I don't think Nathan's router is coming back to life this time. I'm not sure what happened but nothing seems to work. Short of building a jtag connector, which I don't plan on doing, I'm at a loss of what to do to bring it back to a routing state rather than a brick.

Melanie's Buffalo WHR-G54S arrived yesterday. I managed to get it up and going with DD-WRT, then configured it to be used as a bridge. Her piece of junk d-link usb wireless dongle is no longer the weak link in her internet connection. The Buffalo is setup to get the existing wireless provided by the property management company and then connect it seamlessly to the wired ethernet ports on the Buffalo. Then it was just a matter of connecting the computer to the Buffalo via ethernet to get online.