Why does “Acquiring network address” show continuously in my icon tray?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #12, I look at probable causes for inaccurate icon tray
notifications and explain what I do when that happens.

What does this notice mean?

In short, I don’t know.

What I do know )and can tell you) is that it does happen. It’s not that
uncommon for the network icon (in the system tray) to show “Acquiring network
address” or actually show “No connectivity” (with the international No sign
through it) while there is, in fact, connectivity.

Perhaps a driver bug

My belief is (since it’s so inconsistent across the computers that I’ve
used and heard about) that it is actually a driver problem.

I know that some of the information that’s provided for that pop-up menu,
for that icon, comes directly from the driver. It’s possible that, since
drivers are being written by so many different vendors, and so many different
people, that there’s simply a bug that is easy to make that causes that icon
status not to be updated properly.

In most cases, it works and it’s quite reliable. When it doesn’t, I simply
learned that, OK, on this computer, I can’t rely on that. In this situation
I can’t rely on that. I’ll check for connectivity some other way.

As you said: It’s working. So there’s no real reason to be too
concerned.