[randomdug]

little old me, just tried usign the rotuer in teh steps you suggested both on my computer and one with a totally different hardware setup but teh same problem occurs on both - when the router is in line, the lan connection assigns itself an IP Adress beginning with 169.254.xxx.xxx, this happens on both computers. when the connection is bridged with the router no ip address is visible. is this possibly a problem with my router? last night i was able to get on to the router console to try and change its MAC address as suggested by someone else but that didn't help either.
if it helps at all it's a CNET CNIG904S 4 port broadband router, and the STB is a samsung, i have an nVidia motherboard - onboard lan, sound, video etc running an athlon 2700.
back to the problem though, when trying to access the ntl registration page, or in fact any page it tries to load and comes up with "search page not available", to get back on the internet now, all i needed to do was connect the stb directly to my computer, power it down and on again and it connects straight away.
any suggestions at all? i'm sorry about this, and really appreciate your help. I'm goign to attempt a full reinstall of XP pro tonight, and i'll (hopefully) get back to you later.
oh - and my ip is now in the format 80.7.xx.xxx