A collateral problem to this downgrade is with eMule.
Now after a couple of hrs with eMule running on a PC wired to WL500, the NIC here switch every 5 secs in an infinite loop between the disconnected to connected status. No way changing cfg in eMule to reduce connections. To fix I have to reboot PC.
Naturally the same configuration works fine and I have no problems at all with the NIC if I connect directly to my modem instead of WL500gP.

Max