The Linksys access point/router has Open Software. Here In Austin TX
area ham radio operators have modified the software and reloaded the
access point/router software and have
established a wide area wireless router system. The first few of
Wireless G channels are actually in the 2.4Ghz amateur radio band which
facilitated this project very well.
I know this may be superfluous information to what you need but I
thought you'd find it interesting.

It is something that piques my interest. I am planning to
move back to TX and Austin is on the short list.

Any current AMD DDR3 motherboard with on-board graphics will be more
than adequate for what you are wanting to do - and apart from Hard
Drive prices which have gone crazy recently ( due to the floods in
Thailand but methinks some profiteering going on too ) the parts
shouldn't cost much too :-)

Thanks. So building is your method of choice. I should have mentioned that the
reaso I said a separate video card is that I will be doing photo editing.

Yes, I've been self building computers for years and it's always my
first choice :-) Having said that, given the ridiculous prices of Hard
Drives I think a pre-built one would be my choice until things get on
an even keel again ( could be February 2012 ). My supplier has base
systems with huge Hard Drives in for half the price of the bare drive
itself - crazy !!!

For photo editing the current on-board graphics cards are up to the
task and the main thing is to throw in as much RAM as you can. 8Gb of
DDR3 RAM isn't overly expensive - and of course that means a 64bit OS
but even that's not an issue these days.

A couple of years ago I started with an empty box, and I'm still very happy with
the system. AMD Phenom II X2, 4 GB of memory, Nvidia 9600 GT video, WD Black 640
GB hard drive.

I suggest you have a look at the PCMech web site. People there will tell you to
spend more money on a really good power supply (which I did) and only worry
about your video card if you play a lot of Windows games.

Barry raises an excellent point about hard drive prices. $160 for a WD Black 750
GB drive, WOW! Not long ago it was $60.

In two years CPUs have hardly changed, but USB3 and 6 GB SATA have arrived, and
SSDs have become more popular.

I don't want a CPU that runs at 3 GHz with 16 processors, I want a CPU that runs
at 16 GHz with two processors!