And then...
The power supply of my ten year old hub started smoking. My 3com wireless router was already flaky -- it tended to go meekly out of the way when more modern, more powerful wireless routers came onto the air.
So, now I'm the proud owner of a Sitecom 54g turbo storage Linux-based wireless router, nas usb server thingy. Comes complete with written offer for the GPL'ed bits. It took ten minutes and a restart of the router (after changing the essid) to be up and running again. It seems hardware has improved since 1995 :-)
Oh, and it says it's a print server, too, for printers connected to a usb port. I wonder how I can get that to work...