OT: wireless access solutions

It appears as though my wireless router hub thingy has died. I need a new one. But here's the thing. I wan't to setup a smoothwall machine using some old hardware I have around. And since I'll have this, I don't need (or want) the router feature that's seems to be supplied with all these consumer grade wireless access points. What I really want is a wireless access point that simply puts everyone on the wired network, if that's possible. Ideally, I'd like to handle DHCP through the smoothwall box, although I'm willing to do static IP on the wireless devices if i need to. Worst case, I guess I could just continue the way I always have, having the wireless access point handle DHCP for the wireless devices and turning off the firewall features so that everything passes through. Of course, maybe I want that extra layer of security since WEP is so bad. But I know there's new wireless security standards tor replace WEP. Can I get away with just a wireless network board in the smoothwall machine and use that as the access point? I suspect range would suffer. As you can tell, I'm not up on any of this. I know enough to assemble a network that works. But network design and security isn't my thing. brian