VPN

Well...  tattoo "ID10T ERROR" across my forehead!  What we have here is USER ERROR!

For security reasons we keep most everything closed off on the network.  Remote desktop happens to be active on my computer and open on it's firewall.  HOWEVER, the icon that I was using to connect to it from the Workbench had it bookmarked by NetBIOS ID, NOT by IP address.  When I was connected to VPN, I did not get DNS resolution (not connected to WINS server) so I couldn't see the Desktop by name.  Turns out that (all this time) the VPN was working fine.   OYE!!!   Thanks for all the help CMB!

For the sake of anybody who comes across this thread in the future, my comments throughout about why this was not a routing issue are 100% spot on. There are any number of reasons that could have caused the issue described, but it's extremely unlikely to be routing unless you're running some exceptionally complex routing setup with policy routing, BGP and multiple links, or something of that nature. For a relatively simple network like this with static routing, if you can successfully communicate in one direction, your routing is fine.

I'm right at least 98% of the time, if people would just listen...   

glad you got it fixed!