The largest unsolved problem on the internet. Hard to find a good answer via a Google search, so I turn to the FT techies. I am running XP on all my home netwrok machines. A cable modem to a wireless router. All three machines have been able to access the internet fine, but now my laptop is unable yet the other two machines are fine. I have a good wireless connection on the laptop but I noticed the IP adress of the laptop appears in a different range which I think is invalid. I believe this is assigned by the DHCP service which is running on the laptop. I have used the IPCONFIG /RENEW command without success. I even re-installed XP. Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Thanks.

Check the config of your wireless router. Also, make sure it's actually YOUR router that you're connecting to.

Does the IP address begin with "169" or "192" or something else?

Are any other computers using the same IP address as the problem computer? A few days ago, two of my laptops were using the same IP address. This prevented one of the laptops from being able to access the Internet. I ended up having to force the other laptop to use a specific IP address.

The IP address did begin with 169. Now I have 0.0.0.0, I try an IPCONFIG /RENEW and it tells me the request timed out unable to contact the DHCP server. I should mention I tried to re-start the network bridge with no results.

169... is a bogon range that XP defaults to when it cannot acquire a valid address. In other words, its not getting an address from the DHCP server.

Double check your wireless router, make sure DHCP is turned on. Then make sure you are successfully connected to the wireless network. Also, power cycle the router, most of those consumer level routers lock up from time to time...

I've been seeing some issues b/t XP SP2 and WPA2 with AES. So if your security is WPA2 with AES you might want to see if your laptop's wifi card has a wifi management program that you can use other than what's built into XP.

If all else fails and you think you are joined to the network properly, then try assigning a manual address in the correct range. For instance, if you use 192.168.1.x then try something on the high end, like 192.168.1.232 (random and high) or below the scope of the DHCP range like 192.168.1.78 then see if you can connect to the internet. If you can then it may be a DHCP server or client issue...it will at least tell us more.

(edited to remove fatuous post)

Deleting the MAC Bridge interface gets me a valid IP address. The other two computers can ping the main IP successfully. No good ping for the laptop.