Windows 8 blocking IP

Ok a bit of background. Back in the late 1990's I was a MS MVP for desktop operating systems, I have never seen an issue like this so I am stumped.

Wife has a HP Envy m4-1015DX laptop. It is running an up to date version of Win8. The laptop has an Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter. The wife has had significant network flakiness on this machine. Just odd stuff here and there, I have removed and re-installed the drivers etc. Today she sends me a txt saying she cant access our server (Fedora 19 server running samba) she had rebooted and still couldn't reach it. She tried remapping her drives and didn't get anywhere. It kept telling her windows couldn't access the server. So I had her switch from trying to map using the servers name (which is in her hosts file) to the IP for the server, no luck. So I told her I would be home shortly and would look at it then.

When I got home I grabbed her laptop and tried to ping the server, no response, pinged several other IP on our network, no problem. She was connected to the internet fine, dns resolved fine, just for whatever reason she could not see the IP of our server. I checked the firewall and it was disabled. I checked her network settings and made sure she was effectively set to a home network for sharing. I flushed her dns, I flushed her arp cache still cant ping the server.

So I disabled the wifi, plugged in ethernet and bingo it all works. I unplug ethernet and plug in a usb wifi dongle, and bingo it works. So its just the built in wifi adapter and for whatever reason it refuses to see my local server. Now my local server has 7 virtual IP's each tied to various specific services. Her machine could not ping or see any of them, my machine had no such issue.

So what would cause win 8 to completely block access to a specific machine? How is it blocking it? How can I prevent it and clear it?

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