Can't ping my own IP with Vista Home Premium 32bit

This seems to be a common topic when searching past posts, but I can never find a thread that solves my problems. A warning: I'm no networking / TCP/IP expert, so assume nothing about what I am doing.

I work in the electric power industry and have a piece of equipment from the field that has a LAN port for connection to change settings, interrogate the device, etc. It runs a version of Windows Embedded. It is designed so that you can connect to it from another Windows-based PC with Remote Desktop. It has a static IP address (192.168.1.101) but is not networked at all, so if you want to talk to it you have to go to the device and plug into it with your laptop with an ethernet cable. The network/ethernet card on my laptop of course is normally set to automatically obtain an IP address from a DNS server. In order to connect to this device in the field, I need to set a static IP address for my laptop (I use 192.168.1.102) and then use Remote Desktop. I can do this successfully with a Windows XP and Windows 7 computer, but my Vista laptop will not work. With either of the other two laptops with the other OS's, I can ping the field device and ping my own laptop. On the Vista laptop, I set a static IP in IPv4 properties but I can neither ping the device, the static IP from the laptop itself, nor can I use Remote Desktop.

What gives? This works fine for me with XP and Windows 7.

I have

To add some info . . .

I tried disabling and then re-enabling the ethernet network card on my laptop. I am now able to ping my own laptop.

I thought that if I solved this issue I would certainly be able to ping the connected device, thus the name of this thread. However, I still cannot ping the remote device. I am getting "request timed out".

One curious thing that I am noticing is that the LED's on my laptop's ethernet card do not flash when I attempt to ping. I thought that I should get a green LED when I send a request. Not getting one when I ping my own IP or the that of the remote device. Not sure if this is useful info or not.


Thanks