I didn't say anything about the dhcp crapping out; Erich was the one who
said that. I suggested a broken upgrade and recommended trying a live CD to
see if that would work on there. But what you said about setting the address
statically was interesting. Have you introduced any more computers to your
network recently? It's possible that the dhcp server has assigned all the
addresses it can and the leases haven't expired yet. Try giving it a larger
pool of addresses to issue.