An example of the reason I ask is...

I have a warehouse here locally where I have Charter Cable. Instead of running the cable connection through a router, I ran it directly to two PCs, and two laptops. Later that week, I brought my laptop from home to my office, and tried plugging it in, and it wouldn't let me connect to the internet no matter what I tried.

I called Charter, and they told me that per the business package I had, I was only allotted 4 dynamic IPs on the server side that were directly and statically tied to the MAC addresses of the hardware (network cards) of the 4 previous computers I had used.

I had tech support clear the queue of the MAC addresses tied to those IPs, and then ran the modem through a Belkin router and had my router assign local IPs (192.168.x.x) and it circumvented the connection problems because I was only using one allotted server issued IP and allowing my router to assign the other MACs local IPs.

Another thought, maybe I'm off base in your example, but I'm just reaching for potential issues that could be causing this on your end. This especially could be the case if you are jumping from PC to console or console to console or PC to PC, or whatever. Try running it through a router if you are not already.

Oh yeah, and call your provider and see how many IPs are allotted to you on the server side. If it is a limited number, I would have them clear the MAC addresses tied to them, and then run all consoles & PCs etc. through the router alone in the future.

actually...i was just looking closely at the one end of the cord...i think one of the cats might have decided it was a toy for them
ill probably pick up a new one and see if it works

HAHA, oh yeah, I should have thought about the pet-clause! But then again, you never mentioned you had cats, so I plead the 5th! LOL

Or I guess I could have looked at your sig!  Oh well, sometimes you overlook the simple things I suppose. :D