Problem: Windows 7 deskops not getting valid ip addresses every few days. Hi, Well I have a home office. I have been so impressed with Windows 7 7100 beta that I have put it on 2 desktop computers and one wireless notebook BUT left my mission critical machine Windows XP for email backup etc. I come in to the home office some mornings and boot up my XP and Win 7 machine, the other Win 7 stays on 24/7 but the two Windows 7 machines do not get a valid ip address from the dchp server. Whats strange when I look in the router is it shows the 169.xxx.xxx.xxx ip address they start up with in the router. Unplugging the cable and replugging doesn't get a correct address. My solution so far but I won't know if it will work for the long term is to enter a static ip address for IPv4 and it then connects to the router and internet access is successful. I tried setting the static ip addresses by mac address in the router a few days ago but it was not successful either but hopefully this will work as it is machine specific. The easy way to fix it was to turn off the router and reboot the router and it would reset things but as the windows XP machine has always worked it is not a router problem which is a Billion 7404VPG. Also I can connect wirelessly when this happens on my wireless notebook and connect to the internet fine.

This issue is caused by the network adapter driver. The driver may be for Windows Vista but not compatible with Windows 7 RC. As a DHCP client, it could not obtain IP address from the router properly. We could manually set IP address and DNS server for the local connection to try to resolve this issue. If it does not help, we may wait for compatible driver.Arthur Xie - MSFT

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you all about this. As you said I just set all three pc's up with a static ip address and I have no problems since doing that. But all three pc's plus the wireless connection all are different network adapters so it would be unlikely for all 4 network drivers to be Vista drivers and not fully compatible would it? The problem might be at my end thought I have never had this problem in the past. I might do a reset to factory defaults and see if that helps. I am running the latest firmware for the router. There are three brands of network cards build into the motherboard. Intel, broadcomm and marvell and they would all use different drivers right?