annoying onboard lan problem

Hiya,

Seem to be having an ongoing annoying problem with my onboard lan function. The motherboard I have is a DFI Lanparty nF3 250gb s754, and am running winxp pro. Every now an again, my internet just freezes up and whenever I attempt to renew the ip address it just freezes up and then says that I cannot access the dhcp server.

My router is a linksys wrt54g. The router doesn't seem to be at fault due to many other wireless and wired clients having no problems connecting to net and each other on the network.

I was determined at first that this was a software problem, so performed a fresh reinstall of operating system, however problem still remained. Whenever I attempt to do anything with regards to the ip address, e.g. ipconfig renew, repair lan connection I just get a freeze up, and if I could be bothered to wait, I eventually get the error message mentioned above.

I then installed a pci network card. And this was the wierd part, the minute I installed this network card, the onboard lan port started to work. I simply installed it, forgot to even switch the patch cable into the new pci network card port and it simply started to work. I found this rather strange, didn't ponder too much into it. This problem would then occur on a monthly basis, and to solve I would just stick in this network card, onboard lan would work, and then remove network card. Annoying but it would work.

Now the fourth time this has happened, and when I stick in the network card, the onboard lan does not sort itself out. And to get connectivity I have to switch the patch cable into the network card.

Now what is happening here? Any suggestions, if my onboard lan is knackered, I am going to reluctantly have to change the motherboard. But I cannot continue like this as I have no space for this network card, all of my pci slots are full and I am removing one of my other pci cards just to accommodate for this network card.

Any help would be much appreciated. (sorry for long winded post)

Based on what you've posted I would say with a degree of confidence that your onboard NIC is goosed. It's the only real possibility other than an IRQ conflict (which you really shouldn't be suffering with XP).

You could see if there's an updated BIOS, but I really do think the NIC has passed to another plane.

Hmm, that does seem the case Splash, however would not explain why it would sort it self out whenever I would connect the pci card onto the pc. I am not getting any problems in the device manager, driver seems to be all fine. Just cant seem to pick up an ip address. Have tried specifying one manually, that didnt work either.

Isn't it just brilliant that this happens just after a year since I purchased this. Grrr.