just a short history of what I was doing first..
after upgrding the firmware, one of the 3 laptops would not work and would only connect when unsecured. So naturally rest the router, power cycled as well and just for safety, reset again and power cycyled.
All laptops can connect now when the router is set to N only, 20/40 for the width (because one lappy is incompatible with the 40Mhz width) AES only @ WPA2
I logged into the router after making the changes, turned off the QoS auto detect uplink (the most annoying feature on the dlink) applied the changes, rebooted router again.
next, being extremely annoyed at the new captcha, I turned that off as well. rebooted, and upon logging back in (with no admin pwd), it says to enter the code in the captcha! WTF??
I will try to post a screen capture.
I dont know if I can reproduce it, but not at this time since everyone is using the internet, but I will try.
Another bug since im on topic with the captcha, it seems that it isn't random, seems like i'm entering the same 2 or 3 captcha codes. I will have to verify that as well. But on other thing with it, is that it doesn't matter if it's Upper or lower case. Dont know if that's by design.

Edit: Ok, I started thinking outside the box because after hitting "ok" on that dialogue, I noticed that it would quickly show the login/pwd/captcha, which is simply hidden inside a <div> tag. So I set IE to show "no style" it it's view menu, that would remove the <div> tag's, and voila! there is the "old style" login and the "new style" login, which then I was able to use the captcha to log into the router without having to reset it! phew!
I made sure that captcha was turned off in the router...wierd. so I pressed save anyways. Message came up saying nothing to save, asking , "save anyway" I select yes. Then a prompt saying reboot is needed. Which was odd. So I pressed reboot now and waited. Suffice to say, I can login normally now without the captcha.
What I think I did, was hit reboot later a while before, so I could make all changes at once without have to reboot after each one.

Then actually forgot to reboot the router.
Perhaps, if change the captcha, that either 1 of two things, if reboot later is selected, then the new style login should NOT change until the router is actually been rebooted. or 2: a reboot is required after changing CAPTCHA settings, not giving the choice to reboot later.