I have pretty specific issue I'm trying desperately to deal with but nothing seems to work. I recently bought a Netgear wireless router for all my stuff in my new apartment, AND *drumroll* finally bought my own Xbox 360. Yes, after a bazillion years of playing on other people's 360's, I finally have my own. I bought the 4GB because I'll never need or use 250 GB, especially now with flash drive support.

Here's my problem - my router refuses to make the connection type to an open NAT. Instead it stays on strict no matter what ports I forward, with UPnP turned on, and with NAT set to "Open" from the previous setting of "Secure." If you don't know what any of that means, then you unfortunately can't help me with this. I've tried everything that online sites and forums recommend for this issue, because it's a common issue. Most everyone's problems get solved by one or more of the solutions I've already tried - none work for me.

You would think that setting it to open would work but NO, it doesn't. I even asked my roommate to try connecting his own 360 to his own router (another Netgear router, different model) and it's giving him the same problem. I then thought it was my ISP that was the problem, only to plug my 360 via ethernet directly to the wall. And what do you know, it works. So it's not my ISP.

So I narrowed it down to my POS router. Does anyone have any other ideas? I mean, what are the chances that two different routers by Netgear would REFUSE, I mean absolutely refuse to cooperate? I'm almost tempted to say that simply, Netgear absolutely stinks.

So, any ideas? :D Maybe? Possibly? Pretty please? I'll give you a cookie!! :D

EDIT: So it would probably help if I gave you my router model - Netgear WGR614v10.