DHCP Errors on boot; first one machine, now two

[Guest]

Booting up on my new machine (4 days old) suddenly became very slow and my
graphics tablet took forever to load. System Event logs an Event ID 1003,
usually. But I've seen at least one ID 1002. I've tried EVERYTHING to correct
this.

Several software companies feel that it's a conflict with the video driver
(or maybe that's just what they say when they don't know what's wrong. I
installed ATI's latest. The uninstaller, specifically designed for this
upgrade crashed on installation. The new driver installer crashed as well. I
had a lot of difficulty removing all versions of the ATI drivers and then
reinstalling the one that shipped with the video card. No idea if I got it
cleanly uninstalled and reinstalled. The network problem persists, though.

On the theory that the ATI control panel (extensions to the Display dialog
you access through Windows Control Panel) might be causing the problem, I
uninstalled it from my older machine to see if effected the video quality or
performance. To my surprise and chagrin, my other machine now stalls on
bootup, just like the other one and generates the same network errors!
Reinstalling the ATI control panel and driver didn't restore my system,
though.

So, either the ATI video cards (Radeon x700 and 9700, respectively) do
actually mess up DHCP, or I've got an unrelated network problem that is
propagating and coincidentally attacked the second machine immediately after
I uninstalled the ATI Control Panel.

At this point, I care less about the cause than restoring my computers. On
the advice of someone who posts to these forums, I installed the "User
profile hive cleanup service" on my laptop when I was having a problem with a
service closing on shutdown. I installed it on both my desktops and I am
seeing a fair amount of Events on each machine (usually Event ID 1401). I'm
not sure what all this means, but I am anxious to resolve whatever is going
wrong and get back to work. I have lost nearly a week in trying to
troubleshoot this stuff and I am falling far behind.

Thanks.

 

[Guest]

One more oddity that began occuring at the same time as the rest: On all my
machines, I have the classic Windows desktop and start menu displayed. On the
new machine, once out of every 3-4 times that I restart, I get either the Win
XP toolbar on the classic desktop or I find that my control panel settings
are trashed (i.e. I'll find that system sounds or a screen saver has been
turned on, although I disabled them.) If I restart again, it returns to
normal. I've never seen anything like this.

 

[Guest]

I eventually determined that the cause of the above problem was that every
year I get rid of one machine and buy a new one. I move the older of the two
I have left to the desk where I do my development work and put the new
(faster) machine on the desk where I edit music and video.

The router was apparently getting confused about why the location of one
machine had changed and why the other node had a different machine. Odd that
this should happen now because I do the same thing every year.

This is how I remedied it: To be safe, I created a new workgroup. Then I
assigned all my machines to it (through CP-System, rather than the networking
wizard). Now all the machines show up in both the old workgroup and the new.
But at least the error messages stopped and all windows services are loading
at startup.

The only thing I haven't yet figured out is how to remove the old workgroup
from each machine.