Vista IP settings gone nuts

I have had a notebook with Vista Ultimate for almost two months. I use it
from home to vpn in to work via a wireless internet connection. I use it at
work via the motherboard NIC (nVidia).

Last week I left the office early on Wednesday and didn't return until
Monday. My machine *had* been setup to use DHCP, but I kept getting IP
Conflict errors on monday. After looking at the DHCP database on the domain
and event viewer on my machine, it turns out my machine was rejecting every
free IP address that DHCP offered it, getting them all marked as BAD_ADDRESS
in DHCP. In event viewer, I saw that the conflicting MAC was the same for
every IP address it rejected and, fwiw, I checked and this omnipotent MAC was
not the local machine's MAC.

I tried changing to a static ip address and it worked fine the rest of the
day. When I brought it back to work the next day, I was getting IP Conflict
errors again....after rebooting, uninstalling the NIC device driver (whereby
it immediately reinstalled itself with all the same settings), ipconfig
/reset, various things...I noticed that the IP address and subnet mask wasn't
sticking. It keeps going blank in the "Local Area Connection Properties" no
matter how many times I set it. Changing it back to DHCP just fills up the
DHCP server db with BAD_ADDRESS entries. I used netsh to try uninstalling the
IP6 interface, since all we have is IP4 here and the IP6 apparently has about
5 tunneling adapters showing up in ipconfig, but netsh returned a
"catastrophic error" when I tried that.

I'm in IT but I'm not a Vista head and I don't generally do networking
stuff. This is the only Vista machine on the network, so there is no
reservoir of talent to tap here. I'm just trying to get moving forward on my
projects again, without having to setup a new machine (which would delay me
for several days)...but I *really* need network access. Wireless is not
enabled at work for security reasons, although I'm likely to put in a rogue
access point soon, out of frustration.

Does anybody have ANY suggestions? Please?

Well, this has work for a number of my clients.

First. go into the network adapters for both nic and wireless and uncheck
mark tcp/ip v6

Next, and this is simple. Disable the nic you are not using.
Then everything will work ok


"Jess Wundring" wrote:

> I have had a notebook with Vista Ultimate for almost two months. I use it
> from home to vpn in to work via a wireless internet connection. I use it at
> work via the motherboard NIC (nVidia).
>
> Last week I left the office early on Wednesday and didn't return until
> Monday. My machine *had* been setup to use DHCP, but I kept getting IP
> Conflict errors on monday. After looking at the DHCP database on the domain
> and event viewer on my machine, it turns out my machine was rejecting every
> free IP address that DHCP offered it, getting them all marked as BAD_ADDRESS
> in DHCP. In event viewer, I saw that the conflicting MAC was the same for
> every IP address it rejected and, fwiw, I checked and this omnipotent MAC was
> not the local machine's MAC.
>
> I tried changing to a static ip address and it worked fine the rest of the
> day. When I brought it back to work the next day, I was getting IP Conflict
> errors again....after rebooting, uninstalling the NIC device driver (whereby
> it immediately reinstalled itself with all the same settings), ipconfig
> /reset, various things...I noticed that the IP address and subnet mask wasn't
> sticking. It keeps going blank in the "Local Area Connection Properties" no
> matter how many times I set it. Changing it back to DHCP just fills up the
> DHCP server db with BAD_ADDRESS entries. I used netsh to try uninstalling the
> IP6 interface, since all we have is IP4 here and the IP6 apparently has about
> 5 tunneling adapters showing up in ipconfig, but netsh returned a
> "catastrophic error" when I tried that.
>
> I'm in IT but I'm not a Vista head and I don't generally do networking
> stuff. This is the only Vista machine on the network, so there is no
> reservoir of talent to tap here. I'm just trying to get moving forward on my
> projects again, without having to setup a new machine (which would delay me
> for several days)...but I *really* need network access. Wireless is not
> enabled at work for security reasons, although I'm likely to put in a rogue
> access point soon, out of frustration.
>
> Does anybody have ANY suggestions? Please?
>
>