said by DaveMcLain 
:What's interesting is how it just started doing this for no real reason that I can figure and it'll do it on any AP that I've tested. It's only this machine too with any of the wireless cards that I've tried.
I tried setting the D Link router to G only, made no difference same with the Linksys or Netgear routers that I tested.
So far with it set to static IP I've tested it at home and at work and it's been just fine. Right now at home I have the WRT54G V6 with DD-WRT and at work I have an Engenius outdoor AP with a WRT54G using Tomato firmware as the router.
You can use the static IP there is no problem doing that. But in the router it's best you reserve the IP you set to static on the laptop in the Router, so that the router doesn't assign that IP to another system in DHCP client table thus giving error message saying that IP address is being used by another system.
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