Well, after spending some time digging around I’ve found the trouble with my network. So I had two systems in the same box, one cloned from the other. So after running through all the different scenarios, I found that individually, both systems worked fine. Only when I turned on both systems at the same time did my network problems begin. I did some hunting on google, and as I often find, my situation is unique… well, at least unique enough that no one else has posted a solution 🙂
But Virtualbox did give me some clues… it got me thinking that it might be the network for the virtual system causing the issue. So I tried changing from a bridged adapter, with no luck. Then by a stroke of genius, or a stroke of luck, I finally noticed the option to refresh the MAC address.
Magically, everything started working again. So the morale of the story is if you clone a machine, make sure you change the MAC address, it could make all the difference.