well, the last post that I made was solved.
Here is something that I have not seen before:
I went to my aunt's house, like normal. While I was there, my brother used it and contracted a nasty case of spyware, malware, adware... and so forth.
I decided that when I got home that I would use my anti-virus to check it.
INSTEAD what I ended up doing was using my aunt's and she cleaned my computer for me.
When I got home, I put it back on my network, and it wouldn't get back on. I tried doing what I did earlier to release the IP address, but something struck me as interesting: When I typed in IPCONFIG, it said MEDIA STATUS.... DISCONNECTED, and then it had the IP address and subnet of 0.0.0.0
Any ideas as to what might be wrong?