So you are saying I am hooped then. I can't be always having to call my isp to ask them to release my IP address.

My ISP did some tracing also and said that (I don't know the terms) we have two DHCP servers. The IP I am asking for is supposed to be managed by the one DHCP server but for some reason the other DHCP server is pinging (after KNOPPIX doing a discovery a few times) and finding that I have an ip address (from the other server) and marking the ip address unusable.

We have a little odd setup where the IP address is provided by a DHCP server but it is assigned to a specific machine.

So if there is anyone out there that has a solution for this let me know please. We really want to get this working.