dhclient seems very broken, don't know why.

I have a mostly slackware 10.0 based system that seems to work, except
for dhclient. I would appreciate if anyone could help me figure out
why this might be happening. The details are below:

1). When I run dhclient the first time after reboot, I get the
following output-

Listening on Socket/eth0
Sending on Socket/eth0
DHCDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 iterval 7
DHCDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 iterval 12
DHCDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 iterval 8
DHCDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 iterval 12
DHCDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 iterval 13
DHCDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 iterval 8
DHCDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 iterval 1
No DHCOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

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2). The following appears on the dhcpd machine in the logs-

Jul 29 15:53:53 (none) dhcpd: Discarding packet with bogus
hlen
Jul 29 15:54:20 (none) last message repeated 6 times

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3). An ethereal sniff shows that in fact hlen is 255 for some
reason (google searches indicate to me that hlen should be 6).

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4). Running dhclient a second time yields the following-

No broadcast interfaces found - exiting.

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5). eth0 can be set up completely by hand using ifconfig and
route (ie- by running "ifconfig eth0 up 192.168.1.2" "route add -net
default gateway 192.168.1.1 eth0", I can ping any machine in the lan
or Internet, telnet, ssh, udp, browse etc.

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6). When I scp Debian's version of dhclient to the same box,
it actually can get an ip address. I would rather not use this
indefinitely though, because I don't want to mix distributions for the
sake of future confusion.



This really confuses me. I am using the exact dhclient that
slackware keeps in a package, no changes. I doubt that the slackware
10 dhclient is broken, so I must be doing something that isn't
correct. I would really love suggestions on what might be wrong, or
even ideas on what further tests I can do to debug this. I have
looked all around the net using google, and visited an appropriate
group in irc, neither could answer the question.

thank you
-I