I had that same problem with a 3com card and the 2.6 kernel. Worked fine in 2.4, but 2.6 wouldn't work. Turned out to be a power issue. To fix it, I had to pass the command acpi=off in the grub menu.lst file. You can read the whole thread here
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=242786
Also, check your dmesg and see if you are getting a similiar error to what I had in my link above.
Also for clarity sake, DHCP where you always get the same address is still DHCP. The only difference is the server always gives your MAC address the same IP. All the DHCP stuff needs to work for you to get that adress however. A static address is only truly static when it is declared by your machine itself, and no other machine has the possibility of changing it.
Peace,
JimBass