xp wireless problem

hi
my friend had his wireless internet go down (it did work for a while fine) and it won't come back. he runs avg antivirus and microsoft anti spy and xp home. we have tried all router settings and factory reset. we have tried removing and reinstalling the wireless nic. we have tried using some of my wireless nics and always have the same result.

on the router side it looks fine, on the pc side, it seems to be getting the wrong ip address.

windows or the wireless nic driver will see the wireless network. it will attempt to connect, and will then give the status "limited or no connectivity"

the router is configured to hand out addresses in the 192.168.0.100-199 and subnet 255.255.255.0 but in ipconfig on the problem box, it will show the wrong ip address. i believe it says "autoconfiguration ip address 169.254.233.37, subnet 255.255.0.0"

for the status on that network connections it will show numerous packets sent, but none received.

the log file on the router shows the problem machine connecting and sending and receiving packets.

i've tried turning off all firewalls and reseting the tcp/ip properties. I just can't understand why it keeps getting the funky ip address.

any ideas?
Jim

 

Any ip address in the 169.x.x.x range is a windows private ip address, which means windows can't find a dhcp server. Make sure the router is setup to hand out enough dhcp leases and that the nic is looking for an ip address from dhcp not a static assigned address.

 

You probably have encryption setup on your router. Either determine what your proper encryption key is, and configure a new wireless profile, or scrap the enryption on your router.

You can't receive an IP address if you don't have the proper key to decrypt the signal.

 

I know that I've double checked the encryption already. I don't think thats it. I think coleman's got the right idea. Could be that xp's "dhcp client service" is not on. I'm waiting for my friend to call back so we can try to change it.

 

No dice. after the comment by coleman about 169 addresses, I thought for sure it was that his dhcp client (services.msc) was not starting. but we just double checked, and evidentally this is not the case. any other ideas?

Jim

 

We tried selecting different wireless channels on the wireless router thinking that maybe it is a frequency conflict, but that did not help. I am still getting the 169 net ip address.

 

Evidentially the problem started while the owner was using yahoo messenger. The wireless connection dropped and has never come back up.

 

Problem solved. I downloaded a winsockfix program that cleared it right up. Probably got damaged by adware. Hope this helps somebody else next time.
Jim