>Well, that was it. It took 5 minutes for the DNS change to take effect and be seen 2000 miles away. I can now see Laptop as is. It's not something I can explain but I know a DNS entry could cause some weird behaviors like this.
Later versions of Windows use DNS extensively so it's not surprising a bad DNS entry could cause something like this. DNS resolutions get cached locally; if you make a DNS change you may need to issue
ipconfig /flushdns
from a CMD window to flush the DNS resolver cache and force the system to get fresh DNS results.
Another thing to be aware of is changes to DNS while using a VPN. A couple of times when I've been connected to a VPN, I've noticed my DNS requests get serviced through the VPN connection and its configured DNS servers rather than my local connection and DNS servers. Some discussion of this at
http://superuser.com/questions/392269/prevent-vpn-from-changing-dns-on-windows-7-8-developer-preview .
Regards. Al
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