Thanks to all who replied with ideas. 

Turns out the "status 5" and "connection timeout" were due to a flaky set of
Intel hardware. Once we got a duplicate client up and running the restores
went flawlessly.

Strange that I could run a continuous ping while the restore failed but the
ping never dropped. ICMP vs TCP I guess.

Thanks again for all the ideas.

PS. As a funny side note the Sun support people said I couldn't run a
restore from a Unix server to a WinNT client! They maintained that I had to
initiate the restore from the client. In total disbelief I tried it anyway
just to humor them. Same result and yes when the new client was up and
running the restores were done successfully from the Unix server.