Computer will not acquire IP address or hold one if manually entered

We have (2) identical Dell Latitude C610 laptops, both running Windows ME.

Let me apologize up front for the length of this message...

A week ago we set them both up with a Cisco wireless card and they were both working great all week. We took both computers to my parents yesterday, and were going to give them one for them to use around home and when traveling. Along the way we stopped and purchased (2) Netgear WG111T USB wiresless adapters and a new Netgear Wireless router for them. The router was setup in a flash and one of the laptops worked great with either of the 2 new USB wireless adapters. The other laptop we just couldn't get to work no matter what we tried. We spent roughly 10 hours trying to get this to work yesterday and several calls to Earthlink and Netgear and nothing worked.

The laptop that we are experiencing the problems with does not show an IP address. Even if we manually put one in, it doesn't hold. The Netgear people had me go to Command, IPCONFIG and even IPCONFIG/RENEW after manually entering an IP and MAC address and we still could not get the IP address to hold. When I was at IPCONFIG all the IP address, subnet address and default gateway all showed 0.0.0.0 We also went to device manager and it shows no conflicts and that the device is working properly. Is there another way to get an IP address to stick? Or is there something else that could be causing this? I think I ripped out all my hair yesterday!!!

Again, we know the router and USB adapters are working fine, cause today at home with our Netgear Wireless Router, we've tried both USB adapters in the both laptops and only the one that was working yesterday still works, but the other laptop still isn't working. We even tried going back to the Cisco wireless card on the laptop that won't hold an IP address and now the Cisco card will not work on this laptop either?

So the bottom line as far as we can determine, the computer is unable to create an IP address or if manually entered it still will not keep it.

Please help, we really wanted to give this computer to my parents for their anniversary and upcoming trip.

As Always, thanks for your help!

 

When you say the IP address will not hold, do you mean that as soon as you enter the IP address it is gone, or that if you disconnect the USB adapter and add it again, the IP address doesn't survive the USB disconnect/connect?