actually, the forums *are* ablaze with rabid Hero users complaining about wifi problems
HTC's "explanation" is almost certainly bogus, although it would be nice to see it so explained. Did they give you any details?
I believe that the Hero is doing something a little bit different as far as being a wifi client is concerned, and that is tickling something with some, even many, but clearly not all routers. that something might indicate a bug on the Hero, or a common bug in all the routers (less likely), or, most likely of all, a straying into some poorly-defined part of 802.11g where no-one can say for certain who is "at fault".
In my case, I was almost completely unable to get a working connection using WEP and my Linksys WRT54G running stock Linksys firmware (the latest available, but still very old). Re-flashing that router with the Tomato firmware, and using WPA2 produced a massive improvement, although it still isn't perfect.
That would suggest a bug in the old Linksys firmware, yet many other people report identical symptoms with other makes of router.
This sort of subtle, occasional, failure is very unlikely to be a hardware problem, so getting it repaired isn't likely to help.
I can live with the current symptoms, which are infrequent drops of the wireless connection, sometimes every few mins, sometimes only once or twice a day. sometimes it comes back by itself, sometimes not. Once it resolutely refused to come back, and I had to delete the AP details from the Hero and re-add them (the same, obviously) and now it's working fine again. That's not a hardware problem, or a router problem, for certain.
So, when you leap in with what might be a workaround, we're all agog, but desperate for more details...
in particular, what does this mean: "Set the HTC Hero's address to fixed using it's MAC", exactly?
DHCP, but using a fixed IP? Or static IP (i.e. no DHCP at all)?
If the former - and I suspect you do mean this, since you say you do it on the router, where the latter is done on the Hero - then that's not it, at least for some of us, since we're doing that already.
thanks anyway, for the ideas; glad yours are working well, at least