My problem was actually to do with misconfigured hosts. I had set my laptop's hosts file to point to my desktop, but I had NOT set my desktops hosts file to point to my laptop.
Adding an appropriate entry into my hosts file, telling my desktop the ip address for my laptop, appears to have completely resolved this issue for me.
Scratch my previous post.
My problem was actually to do with misconfigured hosts. I had set my laptop's hosts file to point to my desktop, but I had NOT set my desktops hosts file to point to my laptop.
Adding an appropriate entry into my hosts file, telling my desktop the ip address for my laptop, appears to have completely resolved this issue for me.