Wireless fails when restarted with external hard drive

I was attempting to configure my external hard drive to work with Back To My Mac (via this article). I was able to pair my Airport Extreme easily, once it restarted, the only way to connect was through ethernet. I was receiving 169.x.x.x addresses on all of my devices.

I attempted a hard reset, with the external media plugged in...same problem. In fact, it wouldn't even allow me to configure it.

My last airport gave up after a couple of years, so I went and bought the tall AirPort Extreme...same problem exactly.

Once I pin pointed it was the hard drive causing this, I was able to get the network back up and running. However, I'd still like to be able to use my hard drive when Back to My Mac is enabled and the hard drive is plugged in (what if I lost power while I was gone?).

Oddly enough, I discovered it's no problem if I plug the media in after it restarts (once it's booted up), it will show up on the network and everything. It's a 3TB HFS+ formatted drive, normally use it to do Time Machine and to dump random huge files that I don't need everyday. So nothing that should be making it cause a problem.

Any ideas or a potential patch in the future?