on mine, the device manager says all's okay. I'm guessing the cause for the problem is the same on his machine aswell...
and on mine, DHCP client is enabled in services.msc, it didn't get an IP unless I manually assigned one, but it still wouldn't actually communicate with anything even then.
also I did try a new NIC, so I don't think the problem (on both his and my machine) is a dead NIC
@ bigbmxdave, sorry if it sounds like I'm trying to take over your thread, but I think the problem is the same on both our systems.
if I do find a solution, I'll let you know what I did.