My shop PC is a Vista home basic . When I go to network and sharing and select the local connection and I have set up the TCP/IP to 10.9.9.1 and the subnet to 255.255.255.0  . When I plug in the ESS and power it  up I get the yellow led on the RJ45 and network sharing shows an Unidentifed network. Judging from the amount of posts on Google about unidentified neworks on Vista I see that this is a common problem. I have read quite few of them and have tried the various alleged solutions. None of them have worked to solve my problem.
Any suggestions?
Dan  mauch

you mean other that getting rid of Vista, Me or Win8?

The 'unidentified network' means just that, it has no name, it does not mean there is a problem. Anytime you directly connect a PC to an Ethernet device by a direct cable there is no DNS server or router so you have nothing that is going to automatically provide a network name. Any Windows OS will give you the same message, it is nothing to worry about

 There was an additional problem that I should have mentioned which was that there was an exclamation mark before the unidentified network. That usually indicates a problem.  But I have partially solved the problem. As I mentioned I tried numerous fixes posted on Google. None of them worked because after I performed the steps that would fix the issue I would do a restart. That was the problem. I should have done  a complete shutdown because today after starting windows and the control panel with the ess connected the ! mark was gone. Mach3 and the ESS work fine.
 But I have another problem. . Mach4 and the ESS plugin apparently don't.  I am using the plugin that Brian provided. Is anyon running mach4hobby with the plugin?
Dan

A PC will keep ARP records for 20 minutes or so as sort of a cheat sheet as to where to find things. When you set the Ethernet adapter to a manual address those ARP records are still there but are now useless. You can do an IP reset or ARP table flush by a command prompt or, like you did just reboot the PC; that way your starting out fresh and Windows will be able to 'find' the ESS.