Ip conflict = System lockup?

Rather odd thing here.

I just wanted to know if anyone has ever run into a similar problem. I have two systems on a router based Internet Connection. Today, after a both PC's were shut down (Thunder Storm during the night). I rebooted both and 1 PC reported an IP Address conflict between the 2 systems, apparently they both tried using the same one.

Well, come to notice my main PC is locked up at boot, no response and no HDD activity. I thought at first hardware because it is a newly built rig (in my sig) however, after checking every cable, replacing the RAM with known working RAM, it happened again right during boot. Once again the other PC also reporting a IP conflict, again. I took the Network cable out of my main PC and reboot, it reboots fine, no problems ran fine for 30 minutes, however as soon as I plugged the network cable back in, it locked up again.

So, after assuming that was why it was locking up, I reboot both at different times to reset each of their IP Gateways. No problems so far, though I Googled this and found nothing, I'm a little stumped. I've never had this problem before, I have at least 5 different PC's I hook up to this network all the time, nothing like that has come across.
:confused

 

If you have more than 1 pc, you might want to set the IPs on each PC manually. Windows will take a while to auto-negotiate an IP with the router. Sometimes it refuses to use a new available IP, instead it uses the previously known good one which conflicts with another PC. You can leave DHCP on at the router. Just set a unique IP for each PC.

 

Yeah, too lazy though.

Just didn't think it would cause 1 system to lockup completely, seemed kind of odd.