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I am cannot figure out how to make Windows Vista honor a DHCP lease on a small office network with 1 DHCP Server and 1 Gateway. Apparently if Vista cannot find the DHCP Server it sends a request to the Gateway. If the Gateway does not answer, Vista dumps the lease and uses APIPA. Since the APIPA address is not on the same subnet, my Vista machine can no longer be mapped to other computers on the network, nor can it see the print servers. I tried adding IPAutoconfigurationEnabled with a value of 0 to the registry and I ended up with no IP address at all. Any knowledge or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not really into networking, but what if you used a fixed address that is in the subnet? Or in the advanced options enter the gateway address manually? What about the firewall, could you try with it off?
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articl ... erver.html

It sounds similar to this
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233/en-us (not exactly your problem, but I think the broadcast flag and the quick switch (6 seconds by default) to APIPA are part of it)

Lots of possble answers here
http://support.microsoft.com/search/def ... 1033comm=1

I'm wondering why you don't use a static address, at least for all the stationary machines

The reason that I do not use static addressing is related to the licensing on the server. There are two possible modes of licensing -- per seat and per server. If I use per seat I am limited to a total of 5 computers that can connect to the server. If I use per server I am limited to 5 concurrent users. Since I have more than 5 computers and there are only 3 people using the network, per server makes more sense. If I use static addressing, active directory assumes that each of the computers is connected to the server and I am not licensed for more than 5 connections.