A strange one...

I've been looking at a laptop which is experiencing a
delay in picking up a dhcp address on boot up.

It is used for dial up and network access and due to a
separate problem with dial up it was set to always release
its network card ip address on shutdown (via a registry
hack).

On start up the network logon screen comes up but login is
not possible (no domain controller was found etc etc) if I
skip past the logon and check winipcfg the laptop has
picked up a self configured 169.254 address.

However if I leave the logon screen up for roughly 5
minutes it seems to pick up a dhcp address and logon
becomes possible.

I have done the following:

Tried 3 different pcmcia network cards (in both slots).

Reinstalled TCP/IP.

Disabled an IR network card.

Checked what is running (via ctrl-alt-del) when the logon
screen comes up - 2 programs were running but stopping
them didn't make any difference.

Given the laptop a static dhcp reservation.

Removed dameware from the machine as this was reporting a
169.254 address via the sys tray icon even after a
successful logon. I am not convinced I have completely
removed this as after deleting the files from the sys
folder and rebooting it reappeared in the startup tab of
msconfig. I searched for registry entries and deleted one
for dameware and this SEEMS to have done the trick.

All the above has made no difference. When I shut the
machine down and restart it it is still taking up to 5
minutes to acquire an ip address. Needless to say I have
tried it on several different network points.

I'm sorry this has turned into an essay but can anyone
help?