I thought I was going nutz. I also have this problem on open public hot spots.

A lot of times, the hot spot provider wants you to click on a button to agree to a usage policy and there's this catch 22. You can't see the policy page until you get a connection, but you can't get a real ip address until you agree to the policy. I had some success by editing the advanced properties to allow for a proxy server and make it auto-config. That way, I can open a browser first and try to go to google.com. Then, the proxy redirects the browser to the policy agreement page. I cannot connect to my email pop server when I have the connection set up for a proxy server, though. I'm still fiddling with it...