Opening the ports did not help. Turned out that the problem was that the Pogoplugged drives were on a subnet within the house with a LinkSys firewall/router (w/wireless) the machine that could only halfway access the pogoplugged drives (show the drives existed and space information but could not see the information stored on the drives) was on a higher level above it on the outside of the firewall. Disabling the firewall or designating the pogoplug IP address as being in the DMZ did not work either. Finally, I took the pogoplugged drives out of the subnet and placed them up one level which is in the same level as the problem system and now all systems can access the pogoplugged drives.

From what I can tell, the pogoplug devices uses two different methods to access the data on the drives (not referring to the web interface): one for internal connections (inside the same network) and one to reach across the Internet when using the desktop app. In this case, it thought it could 'see' the drives on the network but really couldn't and instead of rerouting to go through the Internet, it kept trying to plunge through to the subnet and didn't know how. My puzzlement is still how did it realize the drives existed at all and coughed up partial information on the drives (names of drives, space used and space total) and yet couldn't actually access the files on the drives. But anyways, the problem is basically solved (a workaround). It was a network topology issue not a Vista-64 issue, but I think there could be a SW fix out there for this.