Wireless Won't Work

So here's the deal: I am offshore and working on a boat. Nothing new there.

I am trying to get wireless working but it's a bitch. I'm doing this from a work-station computer, but I'd LOVE to use my laptop for browsing. I can move it a desk to the side to give me more privacy on browsing.

So, in order to connect on the wireless onboard (this process is new to me), I had to go to wireless connections and give the admin or-what-have-you some hardware code which was tagged to my wireless source (the laptop). After I gave it to him, connection was a success.

My wireless shows me as connected to the network quite easily, BUT internet doesn't work. I'm normally on a static IP address which involves fiddling with DNS server and IP addresses, but whenever I come on to the boat, I promptly disable those (since internet won't work on the boat if I have 'em on).

I've googled it and most websites are all "LOL UNPLUG & REPLUG KK" but that shit doesn't float. This is a public-access (although password-restricted) wireless network. If it didn't work across the whole boat, I'd know. I'm pretty darn sure what the password is (I just e-mailed the tech dude to verify), but I'm uneasy about what else to try. I have IP & DNS server addresses set as "acquire automatically," which was also later suggested by the tech dude (but I'd already done so by that point. This was my first step).

I'm thinking that the fact that this network requires a hardware ID of some sort possibly means that there is an additional snag I'm missing somewhere. The boat is predominately Russian, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was some Russian router with a screwy layout.

I've dealt with wireless networks enough to think that I'm not a complete clod with them. The Network Authentification is set as "Open" and Encryption as "WEP" for default (under the properties for the wireless network), but I don't know if either of those would fix this.

I tried mis-typing the password on purpose and ended up with what I THOUGHT was the same result until it said "o shit. limited or restricted access," meaning I had the password wrong I bet. This means that I most likely have the password right, BUT I e-mailed the tech dude just to verify it.

So, GFF... Any ideas? I am running Windows XP and this is a fairly up-to-date laptop. It's no clunker that would have firmware issues or something squirrelly like that.

Additional Spam:
Nevermind! It works now! <3 A co-worker lobbed out an idea and it worked. For folks that this doesn't work for, they just hand out a set IP address and shit. Works awesome now (awesome slow but still awesome nontheless).

Jam it back in, in the dark.