wireless bridge loses connection ?

My router is a wireless client running dd-wrt sw repeater bridge served by a neighbours bt home hub (thomson speed touch). The set up was working fine but now attached devices (wired:satellite lan receiver, wireless:laptop) will sporadically lose connection after a while failing to get ip/nameserver, though still remaining connected to the network, but the laptop at best will have limited connectivity.
The BT home hub server router 192.168.1.254 transmits 'g' wifi and usually hands out addresses in the xxx.1.60-79 range, my laptop set to dynamic will get eg. xxx.1.65, the sat box usually gets xxx.1.70 after which it is set to static. There are several devices shown on the hub's web if, some static, some dynamic wired and wireless.
We are all on the same 255.255.255.0 subnet, gateway and dns set for 192.168.1.254 on my two devices. The only thing to have changed recently is the addition of a hp wireless printer served by the hub, it utilises something called 'bonjour'?
My laptop can always connect directly to the hub but without my router the signal is marginal.

I have used a d-link dir-615 and a linksys wrt54g (set to 192.168.1.253, but have tried many other addresses) both now with the same problem. Any help would be appreciated.