This is a wierd one, got me baffled here.

Mobo went bad on a friend's computer. I installed a new one, got everything put back together, now it boots up fine. For the first couple of boots, it would connect to Internet on my LAN just fine (mine's set up that any XP machine can be plugged in and automatically be online, you don't have to configure anything in the connection). (This is an XP Home machine, by the way.)

But, after installing AVG, Internet connection went bye-bye and I haven't been able to restore it sense. No idea why. DNS and IP address is auto-configure, which is tested and proven to work on my LAN (my main XP Home machine works this way just fine). So, there shouldn't be a problem. For the sake of argument, I manually configured the IP, DNS server, and Gateway properly...still nothing.

ipconfig shows this:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix:
Autoconfiguration IP Address: 169.254.32.191
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway:

Note that the DNS suffix and gateway are blank for some reason. What's really odd is the IP. My network's a 169.254.2.x network, so I don't know where the heck it got that. And like I said, I can go in and manually change this and still get no connection.

Not a driver issue. The ethernet port is built into the mobo. Installed drivers from the CD that came with the mobo. Shows up properly in Device Manager.

Now here's the wierdest part...

If I do an ipconfig /release then /renew, I get this:

An error occured while renewing interface Local Area Connection : An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket.
Any ideas?