Firewall Recommendation

I'm currently using a Linux machine as a dedicated firewall/router and while it has done a great job thus far, I feel the hardware starting to fail and I don't want to maintain it anymore. With that being said, I need a router.

Now, I've tried the Linksys BEFSX41 and it was great but it kept dropping my FTP connections. I would connect to a friends FTP site and do a "mget" and after two files are downloaded, I noticed that the connection just hangs at which point, I have to reconnect and download. Because of this reason, I got rid of the device.

Now I'm looking at Netgear's FV318. It looks OK but I want to know that this won't suffer from that same problem I had with the Linksys router. A good thing with this is that I've used the VPN end point technology at a previous job and it seemed to work pretty well.

Another problem with these two devices is I'm not overtly confident on how good the security is. On my Linux machine, I run iptables with SPI and NAT. Thus far, it's done a great job.

Lastly, I could buy the PIX 501 but I'm not sure if this can serve as a VPN endpoint. Also, configuration on this is harder and I would have to learn the CLI to control this device.

So here's the important factors of this decision:
1. Security
2. Reliability
3. Ease of Use
4. VPN end point

Any help is greatly appreciated.