strange problem with LAN

[Gerhard Magnus]

On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 12:56 -0700, Gerhard Magnus wrote:
> 
> When I booted up the machine at 192.168.1.13, instead of the usual
> report of eth0 being activated I saw an error message: "Some other host
> already uses 192.168.1.13".  I was unable to ping 192.168.1.13 from
> another machine.  Box 192.168.1.13 remained unconnected to the LAN until
> I manually activated eth0 using system-config-network.  Then everything
> worked normally.
> 
> I rebooted another of the boxes 192.168.1.11 and got a similar message:
> "Some other host already uses 192.168.1.11".  Again, activating eth0
> solved the problem.
> 
Further information:
(1) I don't use DHCP to assign IP addresses on the LAN
(2) On my machines dual booting FC6 and XP (where the XP boxes use a
different range of IP addresses) Windows isn't having this problem.
(3) I update my linux systems regularly.