RAX40 Won't Save Settings

Just bought a RAX40 refurbished from Amazon, and I'm having some serious buyer's remorse. After fighting with the thing for hours (doesn't help that it takes about 10 minutes to restart every time I need to power cycle), I finally got through initial setup. LAN works fine. Wireless, however, does not. I can stay connected to the network for, at most, 30 seconds, before it disappears from all device options. On several factory reset attempts, changing the SSID has failed to save. Several attempts result in the admin password not saving, and the default one doesn't work either, so I have to go through password reset. On one attempt, it didn't save answers to security questions either, and I had to do ANOTHER factory reset just to get past that. Several settings in the router's options don't save at all, no matter how many times I try or how fresh the factory reset is. I've tried both firmware version v1.0.3.61_1.0.1 and v1.0.2.46_1.0.1, per suggestions from this and other forums. Neither seems to net different results. Even leaving everything at default, including SSID and passwords, doesn't seem to last; the wifi still goes out on me within 30 seconds. I'm 99% certain this "refurbished" device still needs refurbishment. To make matters worse, Netgear customer support won't help me until I go through the 24 to 48 hour process of emailing them with my receipt to get the ownership transferred to my account.

Has anybody else had this issue? Is there a fix, or is this thing broken?