Hmmm... well the firewall was off but I was using Windows 7. Might try Vista or XP.

Don't use Vista, it never saw mine at all..

XP saw the router bueven though it flashed through it didn't actually reset to the firmware I was installing. But this was just my experiance.

I ended up using the tftp tool on an old Win98 machine, flashed it straight through first time and everything was back to normal.

One thing I did notice was that in Win98 it took ages after the flash to actually reprogram the router, had a timer screen, so maybe XP will work but just leave it for like 20 mins after it has finished so you don't interupt any install it is doing.