Help! IP cannot obtain automatic address and static adress

I have a Windows 2003 Server with 45 xp Pro machines connected on a single domain.

on 6-2-08 one machine no longer had the ability to obtain an IP address. If I manually insert an address the machine accesses the server, but not internet or e-mail. I figured it was not a huge issue (old machine, employee didn't usually need email or internet) however, one of our newer machines began with the same problem on 6-9-08

The user tells me that the machine was off all weekend. As far as I can tell no updates were installed, i don't see SP3 on either machine.

i checked into a corrupt winsock, but no dice...

the machines are on two seperate LAN switches. When I try to ping the default gateway: 4 packets sent, 4 packets recieved, 0 packages lost.

The The nslookup on both computers is "***Default servers are not available; Default Server: Unkownk; Address: 127.0.0.0"

Also, surfing by IP, I used excite, 208.45.133.23, whcih loaded withe errors (the only thing that loaded was the ad icons & clicking on them didn't take me anywhere.

I have found a temp fix, so the girls can access internet and their e-mails, but I want to actually resolve the problem.

My Temp Fix:

I put in the static IP address, subnet mask, and Default gateway. Then I entered a static DSN. This fixed my problem but I need to know why the automatic is not working before the other 48 machines do the same thing. My IT Manager took her DNS, that she knew was good and plugged it into theirs... any ideas?

 

*bump*

 

I checked and the dhcp is started under services