Okay. I have Norton Internet Security 2005, and Windows Defender Beta 2. I have shut off the Norton firewall, and also the Windows Firewall was off. I don't think Windows Defender has any firewall. It doesn't work still. I had to talk to comcast recently (I allude to this in my OP) and had to use preferred DNS servers. In that same window (TCP/IP Properties) it also gives the option to 'Use the following IP address', and I tried this but did not know what to specify for the default gateway, and only made guesses as to what IP I could use (pinged 192.168.0.54 and it was empty so I tried). I dunno, lost internet gateway.

Anyways, how do I get a static IP address? Or is there anything else I should do?