Local Connection just...Stopped? Please help ASAP!

I live on the internet. I was doing nothing out of the ordinary. Watching a video on youtube and typing an IM to a friend. That's it. I pressed enter on the IM and nothing happened. I see I'm logged out and then I say "Eh. Must be my ISP." I restart my router and modem and still nothing. My dad's computer still has a connection to the internet. I go down back to my computer and try to renew the IP address as I now have a 0.0.0.0 address. Says it can't be renewed and I get a privately assigned 169.0.0.0 something address. I've had this problem before but I can't remember how it was fixed. I can't get into my local connection to set the IP because now it just locks up explorer.exe and I end up having to reboot since the old explorer just won't end. I shrugged it off sicne I have my computer partitioned off with windows on a single partition and all my files and games, etc on other partitions. I grabbed what I needed and wiped the C:\ clean and reformatted and installed anew. And I still have the same problem.

Any clues as to what I should be doing to fix this or what the hell I did wrong?

Thanks in advance.
Dray