Had a Vista Home Premium machine in for disinfect today.

Of course I needed Internet connect to do this, and the Linksys router I'm testing on my network was set with DHCP disabled - So I entered a static IP, Mask, Gateway and DNS. All worked fine and I got the machine cleaned up.

Then I updated it to Vista SP2 . . . no Internet. Went into network config - Default Gateway was blank. Set to DHCP, then back to Static and re-entered all the parameters. Internt worked.

Rebooted. No Internet. No Gateway.

Turns out SP2 deletes the DefaultGateway key from the registry. You have to hand enter a new DefaultGateway key into the registry for your network card.

Good job, Microsoft!

Statics make diagnosing network problems much easier - you know where stuff is. Much better for sharing resources as well.

So we haxxorz just go in where mortals fear to tread and fix the freak'n registry.