Well I did some poking around, researched openWRT a bit, and found out that Linksys WRT54G v5 and later routers are built with a proprietary
OS unlike the Linux-based
OS in the earlier versions. So there is no openWRT firmware for v5 and later models... and guess what version my router is? Version 5!
So I went to Linksys's website and just downloaded their latest firmware version for my specific router and tried upgrading again, and it actually worked. However, I still experience the same problems as before. Guess it's time for Chrome's technique