A few weeks ago, I had purchased a spare WRTSL54GS to do testing on, and unfortunately shortly after installing a new serial port (installed almost immediately after opening the box) and then installing Kamikaze, discovered that the router had become unresponsive after just a few days.
Consulting several experts led me to believe that he router was bricked. I shipped it off to a friend to verify, and all indications are that I had experienced an actual hardware failure, possibly as a result of a power fluctuation here (something I had ignored at the time, but now seems likely to have been the culprit). It is also possible I had bad hardware from the factory, but as I had quickly modified it, I had no way of knowing if it may have been bad originally. Bummer.