Everything looked OK, the hub had blink'n lights and all that, but the hub was jamed, probably from a power glitch. It's rare, but I've seen it before with several brands of hub. Had her power cycle the hub and everything works.

That default address did throw me and cause me to look for overly complex causes. Since most of my networks have hand entered addresses I hadn't come across this before.

The reason the hand entered address seemed to get overwritten by the 169.254 address was that she had two ethernet cards defined in Networks (but only one physical card). The real card was off the bottom of the ipconfig screen and she was reading addresses from the missing one.

Ain't remote diagnosing fun? At least this time the lady at the other end was very cooperative and didn't mind crawling through the storage basement to where the hub was.

Thanks, folks, for all the suggestions.

It was a plain old 8-port Ethernet hub that was jammmed. The reason they still had DSL with two stations was those two were plugged directly into the 4-port hub built into the Cayman router.

She knew enough to power cycle the router before calling me, 'cause that has to be done every now and then when you lose DSL.