You were great...thanks for trying.
I bought an ASUS RT-N16 and it's great...fast, LAN works as expected, really good interface to the router config stuff.
I am sure that the DGL-4500 is approx as good as the RT-N16, but obviously DLink is having issues with firmware. Almost for sure that's what my issue was. And support from dlink obviously could have been a lot better.