WinXP- Event Viewer DHCP warnings

XP Home SP3 - I have a PC here that I worked on about a week ago, and it was working fine. The owner got it home and said it worked great and went online w/o issues until just a day or two ago. I plugged it in here and it went right online w/o problems. So I went thru the Event Viewer and saw a total of 6 DHCP warnings. The first one says this:

The next 5 warnings are all the same, they all say the same thing, and this is last warning of the bunch:

Obviously, I altered the network address and IP address by adding the "x" to it. But the network address and IP address is the same in each of the warnings, and if you look at the times, you'll see that the warnings occured in a period of 17 minutes; so that's 6 warnings over 17 minutes, and 5 of 'em are the same. Weird. Any thoughts on this? Could this explain why the PCs owner couldn't get online at home even though it works here in my PC shop just fine? There's no malware, and everything seems to be running fine (I'm using it right now to post this message)....

Thanks!

[dlb]

 

How many computers, networked printers, etc. are on the network? Did the owner try ipconfig /all to see what the addresses looked like? Is MAC filtering set up? Is the amount of addresses limited?
Also an ipconfig /release followed by ipconfig /renew wouldn't hurt.
I have 7 computers in the house so I occasionally might lose access from 1 or 2 computers. I always suspect the computer is trying to use an old IP that the router has assigned to a different computer on my network (not in use by an outsider).

Most importantly, has the owner changed the default SSID and password? Maybe a neighbor is using his signal and taking the IP address.

 

Thanks for the response. I don't know the answers to your questions since the PC is actually used somewhere else. I think it is the only PC on the "network" - it simply plugs straight into the cable modem, no router, but I could be wrong. The owner is noobish to the core, so training him to use the command prompt and ipconfig is probably way beyond his scope of potential understanding. Anyway, I'll ask him some more questions and try to figure out what's going on. It's just weird that he said "it worked fine on the internet for 2 days, then stopped working". This was after I did a format/reload of XP last week. He called his ISP and (according to him) they told him that "the computer is full of viruses, whoever worked on it last did a poor job". I have a REAL tough time believing that an ISP would say that someone working on this guy's PC did "a poor job" (not the exact words, but you get the picture). OK- I'm rambling. :-o Sorry. I'll try to get more info from the dude and post again later.... thanks for the input plodr!

[dlb]

 

I understand...don't bother him with that. I help people, mainly seniors like that and I simply do not tell them info they can't handle. It saves me headaches, less phone calls and emails I need to respond to. :-D

Does he have protection? More than what his ISP offers for free? (Usually they offer something I'm less than thrilled with and I put one of the freebies as well as malwarebytes on for them.)

Right now his IP is visible to the world and if his security is not up to date and he clicks everything, he could get infected in two days. It might be better to encourage him to pay for Malwarebytes. I have this working on my husband's computer. I even get a blocked address when I fire upo my home page (MyWay) on his computer because a few elements on the page go to ask.com. It doesn't impact browsing but can prevent him from getting some things on the computer in the first place.

 

Thanks for your input.... it turns out that the PC owner's brother had been using the PC and was trying to "set up an internet program". I have no idea what this means exactly, but they took the PC back home a couple days ago and I have heard from 'em since, so I'm assuming that everything is OK...
LOL

Thanks again!