Network Bridge WiFi to Ethernet Win7 IP conflict no DHCP - advanced user needs help

Hi All,

I have read through a lot of other posts but can't find a solution related to my issue.

I have a Dell XPS laptop with Windows 7 Ultimate I want to use for bridging the Ethernet connection to it's WiFi connection. WiFi connects perfectly to the net. I enabled ICS on the WiFi and then bridged the WiFi and Ethernet connections.

WiFi still connects to the net fine on the XPS, but when I connected another PC to the laptop via Ethernet, it only shows a 169.254.116.152 IP address on the PC and throws a Network Error "Windows has detected an IP address conflict." It looks like for some reason DHCP on the XPS is not assigning an IP to the PC to bridge the Ethernet connection to the WiFi on the XPS.

When I do "ipconfig /renew" on the PC it says "An error occurred while renewing interface local area connection... The DHCP client has obtained an IP Address that is already in use on the network... "

I am a fairly technical person having built computers and network for the last 20 years, I've been trying multiple solutions for hours and reading everything I can, but this one has me stumped.

Thanks in advance for any assistance :)