[X4U] Can an Airport Base station wear out?

[Jeff Porten]

Well, it's starting to appear that the problem is that some of the 
network activities I'm running at home trigger a deterioration in the 
Internet connection -- packet loss starts going through the roof.  
Still not sure why, but I'm less convinced than I was that the problem 
is in the Airport -- I got similar results cutting the Airport out of 
the chain and using another Mac as a software base station.

So the new open question is why some activities cause incremental 
packet loss up to 100%.  The two I've found so far are BitTorrent 
downloads (intermittently causes a problem), and originating a large 
port scan against another network (shuts down the network within 
minutes).  I'm stumped, and so are my ISP techs.  Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jeff