im absolutely stumped on this one, ive looked around everywhere, saw that lots of people have similar issues but havent found one clear cut solution yet. please help.
i have a realtek rtl8139/810x family fast ethernet nic
i connect my laptop to the univeristy housing wall jack with a cat5 cable.
all was working fine until my internet all of a sudden shut off and the icon at bottom right went to limited or no connectivity.
i look at event viewer, and about the same time there is a log
Your computer has lost the lease to its IP address 134.71.xxx.xxx on the Network Card with network address 00C09F8xxxxx.

One minute later another log says
Your computer has automatically configured the IP address for the Network Card with network address 00C09F8xxxxx. The IP address being used is 169.254.x.xxx.

i know that is windows automatically assigning me that ip when dhcp server is out of contact.
the problem is not my wire, not my computer (i can connect to my speedstream router at home and internet works just fine), not my wall jack(tried to connect to a neighboring room where the internet was fine, but my laptop still got limited or no connectivity there).

so, that means the problem has to do with dhcp, ive tried the ipconfg/release/renew.

i try to set my ip/subnet to static, but although the limited/no connectivity disappears, i still cannot get on the LAN.
tried reinstalling drivers, winsock fix, netsh interface ip reset, nothing is working.
internet is fine elsewhere, so i think it has to do with dhcp. any suggestions?

I don't see how you had a 134.71.x.x address in the first place. That's not an internal IP.
I don't see why California State Polytechnic University wouldn't be using NAT but I guess it's possible.
Get one of the other students to connect their PC to your wall jack. That's the real test. If it doesn't work, then the problem isn't your PC. If it does work then it's that realtek card even if it worked at home. I've had some problems w/ them before.
979 6361 Paul Henson and
979 6363 Gabe Kuri are given as tech contacts for the University.

http://www.csupomona.edu/cgi-bin/intranet/ldap_search.pl?mode=search&field=uid&value=bctan
Is that you?

impressive don youve found my name and university. all of a sudden i dont feel so secure on the internet. might i ask how you did that?

thanks for the input, ill call the tech contacts come monday if i dont solve it by then.

any more suggestions are welcome

Sure, I'll tell you how I did that and you're correct. You're not always secure on the net.
The first thing that jumped at me was the IP address (134.71.x.x) It's clearly not an internal IP and you thought by eliminating the last 2 octets, it would obscure your location which sometimes works. I then went to my Unix box and ran whois -a 134.71 and the school info appeared. The school has the entire class B subnet so leaving out the last 2 octets did nothing to hide you. Then I went to their web site. Many schools have a directory search so I searched for Bryant. There were a lot of them so I clicked on your name here and matched the info in the gmail address w/ the university address.
I did some more searches but I won't post anything else.

I had the same problem. Solved by setting Cards speed from "auto" to "100 half duplex" when usin this problematic connection.

Your Realtek is asking too much band with from this connection. Set your cards speed to 100 or 10 to gain enough band.
Netw. Adapters --> Advanced --> speed&duplex.