Here's the situation. Our company for some time had been assigning static IP's to W98 workstations. As our company grew, maintaining this information became cumbersome, so we went with DHCP to assign all the network information to the workstations. We were also using hubs to share network resources and to get a better handle on network traffice we installed 3COM 3300 stackable switches. The problem we are having is that some workstations cannot get out to the Internet with the DHCP settings after making the switch. When you run winipcfg on their machines, sure enough, DHCP has assigned an IP address to that workstation as well as the gateway and DNS information. But when you try to browse, you get nothing and then finally you get a DNS error. Now, we installed the switches before we switched everybody over to DHCP, so we thought that since the switches retain the MAC addresses of the workstation NIC cards, that maybe that was part of the problem. But when we deleted the mac addresses for a few of the problem PC's and tried DHCP, it still would not work. What is also strange is that if you try to assign it an IP address it wont work UNLESS you give it the same exact IP that it was using previously. Anything else will not work. We have installed some new PC's since we made this change and they work like a charm right out of the box. The question I have is, does the MAC address get stored anywhere else where it could be causing a conflict? We dont run DNS locally. The DNS information we are using is supplied to us from our ISP which is Sprint and trying to get any help from them is worse than going to the government. I was hoping to get a lead here. Any help will be appreciated.

Just a couple of questions: 1) have u tried pinging the DNS servers from the troubled PCs 2) have u verified with winipcfg that the clients have DNS information 3) have u tried using an IP address in the browser instead of URL 4) Verify that DNS is enabled on troubled PCs 5) Remove all services and devices from the network properties and reinstall Just some thoughts. .5 cents

Try running winipcfg on the 98 machines and releasing all the renew. Sometimes things get stuck there.

I got DNS problem in the past caused by corrupt NIC. Then try to use a different NIC card for testing after the IP test proposed by donny.

The other day I was having a problem with releasing and renewing my DHCP settings on some computers. I kept getting an odd address that started with 168.X.X.X and the subnet mask was 255.255.252.0. When I manualy typed the IP,subnet,gateway and dns I could see the internet and all computers in Network Neigborhood. To solve the DHCP problem I powered off the router waited 1 minute then powered it up again. I went back to DHCP released the settings and renewed on the problem computers and the problem was solved.