Vista Home Edition – internet connectivity issues

Folks,

I recently purchased a Compaq laptop and have been trying to get it to connect to the internet consistently. When I use it at home with my Linksys router and cable modem, it fires up just fine. However, when I take it off-site to my office and plug directly into the cable modem there, it will NOT run. I get an IP address that starts with 169… meaning that even though I have set it for automatically getting an IP address from the DHCP, it doesn’t assign one. Other folks can plug into the modem and they have NO problems. They are also running Vista Home Edition. I have tried “hard coding” an IP address into my system but that doesn’t work either …. any ideas where I should look next?

Thanks!
hpm