Vista Home Premium/Duo V2 - mapped connection dropping

One thing I forgot to mention is that a few days ago when I first started trying to solve this, I did access the router settings, and told it to assign the 11.2 address to the ReadyNAS as a manual address. Duh, sorry. I didn't think an IP conflict was the problem, but I figured it was worth a try. I did it by intuition, but have now confirmed per page 30 of the manual I did it correctly. No effect on the problem. (By the way, the link you posted is the quick set-up guide, no page 30. But I went to Buffalo's website, got the manual, and confirmed that I did the right thing.)

So, there are other wireless devices in the house that are getting dynamic addresses, but if the router has 11.2 manually reserved for the Duo v2, shouldn't be a problem, right? (Spouse has her tablet on right now, it's at 11.4; laptop I'm on is again at 11.5, like it was last night.)

I'm not sure what you mean by Are all your connection drops happening when you use WiFi? so maybe I didn't explain my problem clearly. The desktop computer I am using to access the ReadyNAS and the ReadyNAS are side-by-side, both physically connected to the router with cat5e or whatever it is. It is that computer that keeps saying that the connection to drive U has not been restored, then restoring it, then dropping it again, etc. On one occasion I sat staring at the "My Computer" window and watched the drive go from red X to green and then cycle back and forth between red & green about 4 times in the span of a minute or two. That (along with no drops in wireless music streaming from the files on the ReadyNAS, and RAIDar finding the drive) is a sign that makes me think this is purely a Windows OS problem. Another thing that makes me think it is Windows is Googling "mapped network drive disconnects" and seeing how many problems there are with this, although most seem to involve Windows 7 or some other flavor (maybe because I'm the only one stupid enough to be using Vista? :) ) There seem to be a variety of reasons it happens, but none of the scenarios seem exactly like mine. Biggest difference is, they all seem to involve disconnect when drive has been idle for a time interval like 15 minutes, or at boot-up. Mine can happen, like I said, within seconds of finishing ripping a CD to the drive.

For troubleshooting purposes, when the desktop computer is showing that the drive's connection has not been restored, would there be any value in going to the laptop computer (wirelessly connected) and trying to browse to the drive's IP address to see what result I get?