This is ridiculous. My Dell Wireless 1490 Dual Band WLAN Mini-Card on
a Dell Precision M90 Win XP SP2 just refuses to grab its DCHP address
half the time from public access points. Everyone around me is humming
away with no problem. I've got it configured as DHCP, everything
default, but it doesn't work. During a "repair" or a "ipconfig /renew"
I can see that it does indeed receive a couple of packets, but it's
doing nothing.

If I run Ethereal/Wireshark I see that the DHCP server is sending two
DHCP OFFER packets to my machine, but my machine just ignores them.
This seems to happen in half the public access points I go to (over
which I have no control), and it's inconsistent. Some days it works,
some days it does not.

Do I really have to run Wireshark and dissect the DHCP OFFER packets
to manually configure my Wireless Ethernet card every time? Is there
some mysterious configuration parameter that will help solve this?

Thanks.

- Disgusted with Dell