you have been a great help tech! You don't seem like a newbie to me and I have been at this...gosh...almost a year now but probably why you explained it in terms I understood. Everything I have googled up has been in linux engineer-speak or might as well be cyrillic or something

as I said, since I disabled sw firewall, I haven't had any ip addressing problems. When I saw the dhcp options in the advanced tab (I never go to "advanced" tab anything in linux) I figured that was what was happening. Odd though, the firewall was installed on main computer - not the spare and it was the spare that couldn't get an ip from dhcp broadcast. But will give a try with eth0...I have only one adapter in each machine and no firewire so it is eth0.