XP media ceneter network ping problem

I am still fighting this HP ZV8000 laptop on some networking issues. I
had tried to hook it up to a router to make a simple network. I could
not get the machines to talk to each other. As a test, i got rid of the
router and did a simple peer to peer
network using a crossover cable.

On the laptop now, i can ping the other machines IP. I cannot ping the
laptop from the desktop. I set them both up staic IP
192.168.1.(200,201). If i do a local loopback test on the laptop
(127.0.0.1), it pings ok. If i try to ping the IP of the laptop on the
laptop, it times out. Windows firewall is off. No other firewall is on
the machine. As a test, i hooked a USB network card to the laptop and
gave it its own static IP. It did the dam thing and i could not ping it
with the IP address locally. And the device manager shows both hardware
devices as OK. I even tried to reinstall the network card drivers and no
change.

So, there is some setting on the laptop that is blocking pinging the IP
and causing networking problems? I have tried to reset using IP config.
No change. The browser is running and the server is running. There has
to be some bizzare registry setting or such that is screwing this up.


Bob