Apple Airport doesn't seem to work with statically assigned IPs...can any Mad Mac'er confirm?

[thirdlegstump]

I've experienced this with several routers. If I assign a manual IP address to the Airport cards, it doesn't seem to connect, although signal quality is good to excellent. Once I set it to DHCP, it works fine but I don't want that. The PC's work fine this way. This happens to various Macs with MacOS X 10.2.x to 10.3.x with Apple Airport cards.