in terms the wireless aquiruing IP address, what kinda of router do you have? and what security have you got set? I've seen something similar with orange/wanadoo livesh*tboxes. If you change the security from WEP to WPA it works much better with certain network cards. To prove this you could briefly remove security completely, and see how quickly it connects, if its quick then that is the issue, you just need to find a security option/channel that it works better on.