shared wireless setup dhcp problems (long)

About once a year I setup an area in a hotel for users to access a
network. We are provided a wired connection to the hotel network which
assigns an address in the 172.16.*.* range.

I need to provide a wired connection to 10 rental computers and
wireless connections to other attendees. The total number of computers
involved can not exceed 200 and in reality is not more than about 30 or
so.

I do accept the possiblity of some bandwidth slowdowns, and I am not
responible for maintaining high speeds.

Because we are setting up in an older hotel and lots of things are
changing during the week we are there. It is possible that we will
loose power for short periods of time due to breakers tripping and
such. I have some help, but they are sometimes non technical. I some
times get kidnaped to work on sound or even run an errand or two
offsite.

We do not secure the network using WEP so that users can get on and
check email. Most of the clients are running XP (Home or Pro), with a
Mac or two and couple of Win 2000 machines here and there.

What I have done is the following:

Setup a wireless router and hang the other machines off of it . Setup
a second router with DHCP turned off to help with access to locations
in the room where users can not "see" the second router. We are using
the 192.168.1.* address range.

Last year, We had a brand new Netgear router. It would hangup a few
times every day and need to be rebooted. It would stop handling all
traffic. Even traffic on the wired network.

This year, I bought a Airlink Plus router and used it to act as a DHCP
server and used a different Netgear router as an access point (with
DHCP turned off).

Things did run much better this year. We did not loose complete
network connectivity at any time. However , I would see the IP
address conflict popup on some of the XP machines. Eventually the DHCP
server on the router would stop responding to requests. We would see
this problem even if we did not have problems with the electrical power
since the complete cleanup.

The DHCP client table would show less computers than were connected to
it. It would also show multiple copies of a single computer in the
table. ( I thought it would look at the MAC address of the requesting
DHCP cleint and reuse the IP address if it found it in the table.) The
number of clients in the table was not very large, maybe 20 total
entries if you count duplicates separately.

The hotel has a security system that is kind of flakey to prevent users
from using the network without paying but we are authorized to access
and this should not be a problem.

One other item I should note. The users come and go in groups. A
session ends and people come into the room and fireup thier laptops and
start hammering away all at once.

I mitgated the situation by assigning static IP's where ever possible
and power cycling the router as needed. I noticed that any sort of
reset to the router wiped all entries from the dhcp client table as
displayed.

What I am trying to find out is if anyone has done anything like this
before. I guess it would be kind of like setting up a coffee shop.

I have a limited budget here and I can not afford to spend hundreds of
dollars on some Cisco gear. Also I would like it to be resetable
without me being there. The environment is not something I can easily
reproduce here at home.

Since this last trip, I have played around with a couple of other
wireless routers and I have not been impressed by the quality of the
DHCP servers.

Does anyone make a comsumer priced wireless router which meets the
standards of the DHCP RFC's?

The next thing I am interested in trying is to setup a Linux router
running off of a UPS system. More complex than I wanted to go,
however it is closest to what I currently run. I would like to be
confidant that it will work before I get there.