I have a customer with an HP Pavillion 2.2 gig p4 /512 megs. Currently running a kingston lan card (doesn't matter though as you will see.)

OS is XP pro w/SP2 and the Connection is Cox Cable through a Motorola cable modem.

My problem is that I can't get an addy via the lan card.
Running Via the USB ports everything works great. But when a lan card is used the system waits at "Aquiring Address"

Ive tried Kingston, Netgear, and Linksys lan cards and attempted to to run through a Netgear, a Cisco, and a Linksys router. All have had the exact same issue. (I have definately narrowed the problem down to software) Obviously all ping attempts are failures here.

Attempts at static addy assignments are also failures. I also checked the protocols and they seem to be there and Windows reports that the lan card(s) work fine.

Anybody got any ideas that does not include the format /f command?

Thanks much.

This might seem somewhat obvious, but if you've tried numerous LAN cards, perhaps the NIC in the modem itself is bad?

An issue like this appeared when people upgraded to SP2 with Spyware on the computer. That was way back when SP2 first came out.

I'd recommend uninstalling SP2, try it then, if you can get on, update.