Limited or no connectivity error on unsecured wireless network

When you receive one of those "weird" IP numbers, it's probably in the 169.254.x.x range, right? That called a self-assigned IP, and that only occurs when using DHCP. If your PC/laptop attempts to contact a DHCP server and fails (perhaps there's no DHCP server available), then the PC/laptop has no choice but to assign itself something. And by convention/protocol, it assigns itself one of those 169.254.x.x IPs. Most of the time it's not very useful, esp. since there's no way for the PC/laptop to assign itself other important information, such as the gateway IP, DNS servers, etc.

There isn't any obvious reason why, when using the same wireless router, you should receive a response from its DHCP server for wire, but not for wireless. That just doesn't make sense. At least not from the router's perspective since it doesn't care where the DHCP request came from, it makes no such distinctions. However, there *may* be a difference on the client side. It's possible the wired network connection is NOT using DHCP, but has been configured manually (and properly). At least that's one explanation for the difference. But I'm not sure that explains the situation here.

So there appears to be some other missing piece of information that accounts for the difference between secured and unsecured wireless connections. Perhaps w/ the above information you can figure out yourself. But from where I sit, there's just not enough information.