Mistake numero uno when it comes to consumer grade networking equipment: thinking that brand means anything.
Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, Buffalo, pretty much any brand you can think of do not really do the heavy lifting of the design work on anything you're going to find on the shelf at Best Buy. Instead, they take reference designs from chipset vendors like Broadcom, Atheros, or RALink then brand the firmware and put the whole think in whatever plastic package they want.
What really matters when it comes to consumer networking gear is what internal chipset the manufacturer is using on a particular model; this can be tricky because manufacturers have been known to do things like completely change the internal hardware while retaining the same model number. Either way, the chipset is what's going to determine what the unit is capable of, whether it's hackable, and what problems if may have. Whether it says Netgear or Linksys on the box is of relatively little consequence.
(Though I will admit I tend to look at Buffalo gear first when I'm shopping simply because they're pretty good at putting out inexpensive, hackable hardware. As others have noted, their factory firmware on some newer models is actually a branded version of DD-WRT).
Tomato solves all problems (or DD-WRT, if that's your thing).
My buffalo router had the same problem. For about a month, I was restarting it twice a week.
Then I installed Tomato on it. It's been six months and I don't think I've even looked at the router. It's fantastic.
My experience with Netgears has been that once you reach a certain level of bandwidth usage, the router is unable to cope with it, freezes up, and requires a hard reboot. I've hit this point with a WRT54G running dd-wrt as well, but I've never hit it with my Airport Extreme.
There is a huge difference between the various wrt45g models. For example the "L" model has a lot more memory, and will prevent this situation. Firmware can only help a crappy router handle intensive activity like torrenting to a limited degree.
I think that it is a cache overflow(maybe dns or arp) that is causing the problems in cheaper routers. I upgraded my linksys to dd-wrt and all the problems went away. I haven't had to reboot it in probably a year or so now. Before I did that I was rebooting every Sunday or so.
