Thanks everyone, but I never did figure out or pinpoint why this oddity was happening. Everything I checked for was not the cause, so this question can be closed.
In any case, I ended up working around it completely. Instead of using InetAddress, I just went native and built my own ICMP ping class instead, via JNA, invoking Windows libraries IPHLPAPI.DLL and WSOCK32.DLL. Here is what I used...
public interface InetAddr extends StdCallLibrary {
InetAddr INSTANCE = (InetAddr)
Native.loadLibrary("wsock32.dll", InetAddr.class);
ULONG inet_addr(String cp); //in_addr creator. Creates the in_addr C struct used below
}
public interface IcmpEcho extends StdCallLibrary {
IcmpEcho INSTANCE = (IcmpEcho)
Native.loadLibrary("iphlpapi.dll", IcmpEcho.class);
int IcmpSendEcho(
HANDLE IcmpHandle, //Handle to the ICMP
ULONG DestinationAddress, //Destination address, in the form of an in_addr C Struct defaulted to ULONG
Pointer RequestData, //Pointer to the buffer where my Message to be sent is
short RequestSize, //size of the above buffer. sizeof(Message)
byte[] RequestOptions, //OPTIONAL!! Can set this to NULL
Pointer ReplyBuffer, //Pointer to the buffer where the replied echo is written to
int ReplySize, //size of the above buffer. Normally its set to the sizeof(ICMP_ECHO_REPLY), but arbitrarily set it to 256 bytes
int Timeout); //time, as int, for timeout
HANDLE IcmpCreateFile(); //win32 ICMP Handle creator
boolean IcmpCloseHandle(HANDLE IcmpHandle); //win32 ICMP Handle destroyer
}
And then using those to create the following method...
public void SendReply(String ipAddress) {
final IcmpEcho icmpecho = IcmpEcho.INSTANCE;
final InetAddr inetAddr = InetAddr.INSTANCE;
HANDLE icmpHandle = icmpecho.IcmpCreateFile();
byte[] message = new String("thisIsMyMessage!".toCharArray()).getBytes();
Memory messageData = new Memory(32); //In C/C++ this would be: void *messageData = (void*) malloc(message.length);
messageData.write(0, message, 0, message.length); //but ignored the length and set it to 32 bytes instead for now
Pointer requestData = messageData;
Pointer replyBuffer = new Memory(256);
replyBuffer.clear(256);
// HERE IS THE NATIVE CALL!!
reply = icmpecho.IcmpSendEcho(icmpHandle,
inetAddr.inet_addr(ipAddress),
requestData,
(short) 32,
null,
replyBuffer,
256,
timeout);
// NATIVE CALL DONE, CHECK REPLY!!
icmpecho.IcmpCloseHandle(icmpHandle);
}
public boolean IsReachable () {
return (reply > 0);
}