A new day.
After powering the router back up (after unplugging the power as noted in my previous post) and then the reader, and attempting to connect, nothing still. Same old results.
Note: Something stuck in my mind as odd, that being that my router could see the reader, however it looked to it as if the reader did not have the static IP I had assigned to it. This will be resolved shortly... (teaser alert).
I finally performed a soft reset to clear the static IP information, hoping to see if it would prompt me for an IP (didn't think it would, but at this point I didn't have anything to lose). Nope.
Now the big gun: I did a hard reset to restore it to factory settings (sheesh, that's ALMOST as bad as doing a hard reset on the HP iPAQ's! ...but let's not go down that road). Still no connection.
I was about to tell my folks to take this thing back to the store they got it from and throw it through the window (oh, sorry, wrong company), when while in the thinking room, I had a fleeting thought... (insert several minutes of commercials, maybe a week until this episode continues
)