Router & DHCP Problems

Several days ago, without warning, my computer had some pretty bad internet slowdown on out wireless network. I re-installed my wireless card drivers, and suddenly everything stopped working. When I tried to connect to the network, windows would spend about 5 mins acquiring network address, and then switch to 'Limited or No Connectivity.' Instead of the netgear standard address, it would give me 169.254.x.x and the same for default gateway. I figured the problem was with my computer as my roommates still ran everything flawlessly (One wired to the router and the other on wireless) so I tried a different wireless card, a different PCI slot, reformatted and reinstalled windows, and finally tried to run the internet on my computer through ubuntu. None of these changed the problem, so I reset the router, which restored my connection to normal, but gave my roommate on wireless the exact same problem that I had been having before. I know its not an XP SP2 error (which is what I'm running) because it worked fine up until several days ago, and my roommate is running Vista. Also, I have already tried disabling and re-enabling the WEP on the router.

The router is a netgear WGR614 v6, my computer is on XP SP2 with a netgear WG311 v2 wireless card.

 

Are you using The Netgear software or Windows to run the wireless card?

You cannot use both - Netgear gives you the option when you 'Install'

 

I am using Netgear's wireless config utility, but when I was having the problems, I tried switching between them, with no discernible difference. My roommate that cant access the internet now uses the windows wireless config.