I’ve started noticing that VISTA seems to refuse to correctly react to the ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew commands.

I’ve noticed this with both wireless and wired connections.

A typical situation happened the other day:

Customer has a new ADSL modem, and a new VISTA PC, but cannot get it to work.

She paid Clive Peeters an extra $100 for a “tech” to install the new PC, but he couldn’t get adsl to work, so he suggested she go back to dialup.

Her brother also had a go (he tried to connect the modem to the PC via USB (folks: don’t do usb broadband unless you absolutely have to).

So, I connect the modem to the PC via ethernet, but VISTA says its got a 169.x.x.x address.

OK, I start an administrator command prompt, and do ipconfig /release, then ipconfig /renew

but the address is set to 169.x.x.x again…

I restart VISTA: hey it now gets the correct DHCP address!

I know XP is sometimes reluctant to notice network changes (particularly with workgroups), but it seems that VISTA is worse.

Although I must admit that someone had also disabled UAC, so who knows what else was done to the PC before I got there.