I have no advice as to the Airport Express. Never used one.
But if you're looking for a good router, I can recommend one. I picked up a D-Link DIR-655 last year. Best router I've ever owned, and I've owned a half dozen. Link speeds, stability (both LAN and WAN), and WiFi range are all incredible. I've only had to reboot it once, and that was for a firmware update. Offers a tremendous amount of features & customizations, such as a gigabit switch, B/G/N Wifi, dual firewalls, Quality-of-service settings, traffic monitoring/blocking, etc. It's a very good router for ~$100. Simply put, it just works.
And you mentioned wireless printing. I recently bought an HP Photosmart C7280. It has built-in WiFi and it works flawlessly with the router. Very cool to be able to print wirelessly from anywhere at home. And it's also nice to be able to put the printer wherever it needs to go, untethered from any other network devices.
I've only had it for a couple of weeks, but I'm quite impressed with it so far.
