Unable to obtain a server-assigned IP address. Try again later or enter an IP address in Network settings.

Hosted by ZooomrThis has been the least favourite error message on my K-Jam. It's not the most annoying problem, but it's one of those really annoying and consistent problems that you can never quite find a solution to.

Today, as luck would have it, I had a spare minute to go playing to see what would fix it. And found two solutions: 

Solution #1 - via the GUI 

In Settings | Connections go to Configure Network adapters.

Set the 'Remote-NDIS Host' settings to use a specific IP address of 169.254.2.1, subnet 255.255.0.0, and a default gateway of 169.254.2.2

Solution #2 - via Editing the Registry

Fire up your registry editor then head to:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\RNDISFN1\Parms\TcpIp]

Set AutoCfg to 1

Set EnableDHCP to 0

Soft reset the device to activate the change

 

I can't help but wonder why we have to do this. Shouldn't someone in the project team spotted this really annoying dialogue somewhere along the line and fixed the defaults? Or can we have a sp2 for the ROM that fixes this and some of the other little niggles which stops WM5 PocketPC phones being the world beater they're so close to being (okay, so maybe it won't win heaps of market-share overnight, but it's a great way to keep the faithful, well, faithful!)