constant network crashes
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ok, so I have a network, and it has had serious trouble since before I started working on it. It continues to be problematic at best, and down right broken at worse. I'm pretty much at my wits end with it!

Here's the setup- We have internet traffic being sent in, then split between a router, a netgear prosafe FVG 318 (regular internet) and an edgewater SIP phone system. The netgear plugs into a 24 port POE switch which then serves the building.

Here's the problem- The network is insanely spotty. People are constantly loosing connection off the wireless, and I finally decided to assign everyone (including our SIP phones) static ip's, which seems to stabilize the connections some what. However, when attempting to use DHCP to connect, often users will not be able to authenticate and receive a valid IP address. This happens for both wired and wireless connections. The weird thing is that some times it works, and other times it does not. the DHCP is not allowed to assign ips in the ranges assigned for static ips. While monitoring the connection with ping -t, about every 20th result returns either unreachable or times out.

resetting the router/WAP seems to help these problems, but they come back quickly. At one time there were two DHCP servers running on the network, and I disabled the other server, and let the router serve the IPs.

Lastly, we just got in two WAP's to extend our wireless network to the far ends of the building, but I don't want to install them until I find out what is wrong with the rest of the network, or else I"ll just be making a bad situation worse.

So here are my two questions:
1) What is causing the DHCP server to not serve IP addresses correctly?
2) How should I set up the wireless? Does having it on the same subnet cause IP conflicts, and if so, should I create a second subnet?