I would highly recommend the Linksys WRT54GL router from newegg. So far this thing has 2347 reviews, 93% of which are four (9%) and five (84%) star reviews. Only 2% of the people who have purchased this router from newegg and reviewed it feel that it's a 1 star router.

I have purchased several. It is not a wireless N router so if you want to be able to stream 27 DVD's simultaneously to various places in your house, this router may not have the bandwidth for what you're doing. However, if you're just using it to share an internet connection rather than share lots of very large files (in excess of 1 GB in size) your internet connection will most definitely be slower than the router and you will therefore notice no difference between being plugged directly into your cable or DSL modem or being plugged into the router.

One limitation of many routers is their firmware. Some companies have some decent hardware and some very poorly designed firmware. This is why many people really like the WRT54GL router. It's hardware has proven reliable over the years (as evidenced by the newegg reviews), it's stock firmware is "good enough", but if you want more options and more reliablilty than what most any other consumer oriented router will give you, it has enough memory on it that you can download custom firmware for it (dd-wrt or openwrt are two common ones that come to mind). Basically these are open source firmware sets that are based on linux and they allow you much more control over your router while adding an extra layer of stability.

Most people that buy the router don't feel the need to go that far, but if you ever find yourself frequently rebooting it (something I've experienced with several routers both cheap and expensive) there's a good chance you can make it into a trouble free router just by putting the open source firmware on it.

Anyways, I've purchased probably 5 of these over the years for friends and family and have never had an issue with them so they have my vote.