Yep, give static IPs to all your devices; it works wonders :thumbsup:

I have "a friend" that agrees with that assessment.

Agreed. Every MAC address that hits your router should be given a unique, permanent internal IP.

How do you do this? I have a Linksys 802.11g router and am having the same issues with the router assigning IP adresses.

I don't know what they call it on a Linksys, but I've seen it called "Vitural Server" on the D-Links. Somewhere in the router's config (usually http://192.168.0.1) there's a place where you can map your MAC Address to an internal IP. If you can't find it, let me know what model router you've got and I'll see if I can find in the online docs how to do it.

Should I map the Xbox's Mac to an internal IP?

The xbox picks up my network, accepts my WEP key, but fails at the IP spot.

Yes, that's what you'd do. Whether or not that fixes your problem... :shrug:

No Linksys router that I know of supports reserving DHCP IPs by MAC address with stock firmware. You can, however, just set a static IP on the XBox itself by going into its networking settings. Assign an IP that is outside the range your router hands out via DHCP (by default, usually 192.168.1.100 to .150 on a Linksys) and that is not used by any other device on your LAN.