We've got 2-4 computers networked across the house currently, with the router and modem over at the far end and my computers at the opposite end. Noticing that I was getting a very weak signal from across the house, I bought and installed an Airlink wireless repeater yesterday, which seemed to improve my connectivity significantly.
The only issue is that now my computer (only one of the computers on the network) is getting constant IP conflicts. Event viewer displays the repeater's MAC address as the source of the problem.
I cannot change or set the repeater's IP address; it just resets back to its default (192.168.1.250). My computer was originally 192.168.1.4 with automatic IP assignment, but when I started receiving the IP conflict errors I changed it manually to 192.168.1.7. It doesn't matter what I set; I continue to receive IP conflict messages regularly, whether I set it manually or allow it to detect automatically.
A few hours of googling revealed that this isn't uncommon when using wireless repeaters, and is the result of something called Gratuitous ARP, so I looked this up and found that the registry key ArpRetryCount can be added and set to 0 to suppress this (I am running Windows 2000 Pro on this machine). So I gave that a try, but it seems to have had no effect. I am really not sure what else I can do.
If anyone has successfully handled this problem, I would love to know how. I don't really want to stop using the repeater if I can avoid it.