Networking Oddity with Vista

Greetings, I am working on an Acer laptop for a friend, it is a 4315 model, and until recently has attached to wireless networks with ease. However, as of late, it will see a wireless network, "attach" to it and get local only connectivity.

Even though it does this, it never gets anything other than a 169.*.*.* address which is usually the windows default when dhcp cannot be obtained.

The odd part is that it does it with the built in wireless, wired or even new known to be working external USB wireless cards.

This issue is totally foreign to me, even when I make all the information static, or if I go into the router config and make the MAC address of the card have a reserved DHCP address it gets nothing.

The router can see it, but I cannot get it to take the network settings from any router currently.

I have gone pre-configured IP and gateway as well to no success.

I am just looking for more information on this topic. Has anyone run into this before, or am I breaking new ground in the Vista arena?

Thanks
Ryan in TN