I've had it.I'VE HAD IT WITH VISTA.AGAIN, TODAY... I CAN NOT GET A DHCP ADDRESS FROM A WINDOWS 2003 STANDARD SERVER RUNNING DHCP. Just 40 minutes ago (at a different branch) USING THE SAME LINKSYS WIRELESS SWITCH (NOT A ROUTER), CONNECTING TO THAT BRANCH'S WINDOWS 2003 DHCP SERVER... IT WORKED JUST FINE. COME to my main data center, and no dice. CHECK MY UPDATES (YOU WILL UNDERSTAND WHY IN A MINUTE AS I FILL IN THE HISTORY), and while the evil update 938371 had NOT re-updated itself (though the old one from the 8th (i didn't fire up my laptop with this vista hard drive for 2 months - so it wasn't installed til the 14th) is still there. BUT EVEN THOUGH I HAD UPDATES SET TO JUST NOTIFY ME... low and behold all these office updates and a capicom update were installed. TODAY!?!?!? WTF?!?!?!Here's a little history.I BOUGHT the full retail version of windows vista ultimate on THE DAY IT CAME OUT to RETAIL STORES. and spent a TON OF MONEY on it. I had plans to build a nice gaming pc and wanted to run vista 64bit. and yes, i was a bit scared of 64 bit as we had xp64 on a marketing pc and it NEVER worked right with drivers and had NUMEROUS lockups... probably due to drivers again. This came from the DELL FACTORY with x64 installed. anyway. I installed my retail copy of vista ultimate on a 2nd hard drive on my xps2. well that machine was not OBVIOUSLY ready for it, so i just figured oh vista will be fine and i waited. I bought an xps m1710 with vista ultimate 32bit. Great. serious hardware. should run vista just fine. and it did. UNTIL I JOINED IT TO OUR CORPORATE DOMAIN. THEN, DHCP would NEVER WORK AGAIN. EVER!!!!! I thought it was a fluke, updated all drivers, and still nothing. So, i installed it on some very new OPTIPLEX desktops. again. just fine until i joined the domain, and then... no dhcp. and so goes the saga about dhcp from the microsoft people "in the know". oh its a 3rd party router, update this, firmware that... blah blah blah... WHAT THEY SEEM TO FORGET IS THAT IT WORKED JUST FINE UNTIL JOINING THE DOMAIN. i mean. i'm trying to connect to ANY NUMBER OF OUR 13 different branch servers which all run windows 2k3 standard r2 server running a dhcp server locally. THIS IS MICROSOFT'S PRODUCT and it doesn't work? Fine. shelved vista after trying all the various fixes on the web. (disable this flag, that flag, this registry setting, this tweak here, this hack here.. blah blah blah)Built my desktop. just used vista 32. dual booted because GAMING WAS SO BAD that i thought it was a joke. DID NOT JOIN THE DOMAIN. dhcp has worked perfectly taking that machine to different locations with NO PROBLEMS. SP1 DID INDEED FIX MANY OF MY gaming issues, and so now i barely use xp pro on my home desktop. Its an sli machine with 4gb ram and a quadcore chip, so yeah... it SHOULD RUN THINGS WELL...GREAT I THOUGHT. we ordered 3 VOSTRO 1700s all with nice specs and a decent gfx card. All came with vista business (all that they offered) and guess what... EVERYTHING WAS FINE UNTIL I JOINED THEM TO A DOMAIN. then, no dhcp, cant diagnose cause the service isn't started, and guess what it keeps saying access is denied even though i'm an admin, using the domain admin account to set it up. WTH!??!?!?!?Finally found a command on these forums about secedit----verbose which changes all the security settings back to default. OMG>>>>> IT WORKED!!!!! DHCP IS FINALLY WORKING ON MY 1710. i had hopes to maybe bring back vista to the vostros since we DOWNGRADED them to xp pro.Guess what. the NEWEST version of the evil update 938371 installed automatically and BROKE IT AGAIN on my 1710. i had 3 days of vista bliss. or close to it, as gaming with sp1 on the 1710 STILL SUX. So, i go to remove the stupid update as i read on many blogs that its causing mucho issues with mice and peripherals, etc.... OMG. i CAN NOT UNINSTALL THE OFFENDING UPDATE!!!! $*#&&$!!!!So i have to do a system restore. I quickly turn off the auto-updates for windows updates and things are ok again. so another few days go by. And when i mean ok... i mean ok. . connecting to ALL of my dhcp servers, my linksys router at home, my parents netgear router, my friends belkin, the test cisco router i setup with dhcp STRICTLY TO TROUBLESHOOT VISTA, and the wireless switch i take to all branches to connect to their branch dhcp server (again running win2k3r2 and microsoft's dhcp service) when i'm there working on issues.SO TODAY. things are fine this morning. I get to my data center office, and now no more dhcp working. i'm so ticked right now i'm seeing red.All of these office updates were installed with the capicom today. and i have auto update disabled. SO to even get here, i had to give myself a static IP address... THIS IS FINE FOR ME, I GUESS, but for my executives who just want stuff to work???!? THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE.****** We have decided that if microsoft stops XP pro distribution with new PCs from DELL, who we buy all of our servers and storage and PCs and LAPTOPS from... we'll just skip the update cycle and fix the PCs as they die. THERE IS NO WAY we're going to vista. heck, it wont even display our intranet right, file transfer to and from my shared drives on my WINDOWS 2003 SERVERS IS STUPID SLOW, LOGON SCRIPTS ARE IFFY AT BEST, and stuff just crashes (explorer, games, wmp, etc..) NOT TO MENTION THAT NONE OF OUR ENTERPRISE banking software works right. And i cant even see half my xp pro machines on my network. to top it off most of the server management tools dont work on vista. at least i can use remote desktop i guess.I'm extremely upset. i'm upset i bought into the hype. i'm upset that things just dont work right. i'm upset that i keep giving microsoft my personal money as well as my company's money. If the banking software we use was NOT based on .net .... well, i dont know how much longer we'd stay a MICROSOFT SHOP. Please forward this to Bill Gates, BALLMER, and all the other people who think that the wow is now or whatever the catch phrase of the week is. You have GOT TO FIX this. I have this funny gut-wrenching feeling that sp3 for xp will cripple it so that we think vista is great. I'm seriously so mad that i'm just about to wipe this stupid vista drive on this 1710 cuz its pointless to even have it installed. I dont care how you do it MICROSOFT. JUST FIX IT. and stop releasing updates that break my PCs. Jason Hassett Network Administrator(company name witheld as who knows what repurcussions we might have to face because of my rant. feel free to send me as much hate mail as you want at jhassett@gmail.com)

And yes i have numerous addresses available within my scope.