I'm trying to help a friend of mine get her computer up and running again. Shes got windows XP hooked up directly to her cable modem (no home network). However, she can not get any sort of IP address on her computer. Infact, the cable company came by her house and brought them a completely new NIC (even left the drivers) and even that NIC will not obtain any sort of IP. We're talking no 169's (for windows default) or even the *possible* 192 that a router/disabled modem could occasionally give. We are stuck with 0.0.0.0 and no amount of Repairs, release/renews, or NIC reinstalls can get rid of it. I was wondering if there were any other ideas to fixing the problem? The odd part is, the friend mentioned that it was working directly after a system restore, and they were even able to download and install a program or two. After restarting their computer though, nothing worked. I'm wondering if maybe it's just the app or two that they installed that could be causing the problems (I'll look into that), but maybe they just need to update something on their computer. I don't know, just somewhat thinking "out loud" here, so if anybody has any ideas about what I might try, let me know.

Start, Run, CMD. At prompt, type ipconfig /release (space before slash), enter; then type ipconfig /renew, enter. Tell me what the answer is after both of those, especially renew.

Where is the prefix 0.0.0.0 entered that it cannot be edited? FYI: 0.0.0.0/8 has a number of unique properties, many of which were built into the protocol stacks used throughout the Internet. 0.0.0.0/32 or the all-zeros address has been used and is still recognized as the historical broadcast address. This use or restriction is deprecated and modern code will treat broadcast correctly as an all-ones value within the subnet. It is fairly common practice to use 0.0.0.0 to encode the idea of "default".

As I said before, the "Renew" will not do a thing. (The Windows XP renew performs several tasks at once, including the infamous "release/renew" and a simple reinstallation of the TCP/IP stack. For a full install, restarting windows automatically rebuilds that stack as well.) As for the specifics about what goes wrong? Well I remember there were 4 steps that are reported as failing for that Repair, not the least of which is "renewing ip address". The other three I can't remember as easily though. (I won't be able to see for sure until a little later today.) (Thanks for the info on broadcasts and the like. I may not know everything about IP addresses, but I think I know enough to get by. And in this instance, I'd be hoping for atleast a 169.254.x.x ip (default) or possibly even for the cable modem to assign and grab the right ip from the DHCP servers. So this complete set of 0's is almost baffling, since it's the only thing I can generate anywhere, and on either NIC.) (I'll have to make sure that the DHCP client (service) is running too, that's one thing I know I haven't checked yet, although I see no reason why it would not be running. (But it will be checked...))

The only reason I asked about the message you get from renew is that if you get something related to a socket I know how to fix it.

:) Well it's worth hearing about, just in case. As I said, I don't have readily available access to the computer, so I don't remember the specifics. How about you share the details (just in case) and if I can't think of anything, I can try it. Because at this point, the only solution that we still haven't gone through is trying a full system restore (which might end up happening if nothing else works). Thanks for the assistance.