Station stalls in high traffic

Hi all,

At home I have this Belkin Pre-N basestation (Welcome to Belkin - Wireless Pre-N Router) that is running my network, my main laptop connected directly to it and 2-3 other laptops throught the home in wireless mode. The basestation is connected to a net segment directly (PPPOE), not to a modem. Every now and then the station seems to stall. Altough the signal is strong, no computer can connect to the wireless channel. And the one connected to the cable has problems. For instance opening the basestation web config page take ages and eventually loads only fragments of the page. Whenever this happens and I connect the straight to the PPPOE network and monitor netweok traffic, I see a huge volum of packets flying by, sometims normal traffic, sometimes ARP floods from badly configured cards in my net segment.
I have also found that the wireless seems to perform better, less stalling even in high traffic, if I turn off wireless encryption.
Also when this stalling happens the moment I diconnect the PPPOE cable from the basestation it recovers immedeatly (although with internet connection lost, obviously).

I have considered also signal interference, but the 'stall' condition does not seems related to other signals in my area (there are usually 2-3 other SSIDs up, but they're always the same and I'm carefull to move my station on a separate channel id).

Based on these symptoms I believe the problem is basically the basestation doesn't have enough CPU bandwith to deal with the volume of traffic it sees on the PPPOE network segment.
Is this a realistic assesment?
If that's the case, is there a solution for the Belkin router, eg. replace the firmware? I already have the latest Belkin firmware for it, but consider other firmwares, would they help?
Or if this won't solve my problem, can you recommend another model that has more whoompf in its CPU and would handle a high traffic situation w/o
stalling the basestation.

Thanks,