I think I finally found the problem after posting this on 4 forums. Per
http://forums.techarena.in/showthrea...=693277&page=2 several people had the same issue I did
"Windows cannot create a network map for the selected type of network connection" when they had installed
NVidia ethernet driver (v65.55).
Both of my Vista Machines are AMD 64 X2 PC's and the Asus motherboards are using NVidia Chipsets. I need to get back to some real work so I'm going to guess that my issue lies in having the NVidia driver installed. I looked at the NIC properties and the "Rollback Driver" button is grayed out so there appears to be no easy way to try a different driver right now.
Case closed - for now!