I have been using the ESS smooth stepper on my machine for about 6 months or so. Lately, I experienced a crash on my machine and I had to perform an E-stop on all my electronics in the middle of a job. After checking the machine the next day the spindle and spindle motor appeared okay, and all the diagnostic lights on the electronic parts came on without a problem. Also, it sounded as though all of the motors powered when I supplied power to them. However, when I loaded Mach4 the ESS did not communicate with Mach. I attempted all of the potential fixes listed on Warp9td's website, but I never got the ESS to respond, even though all of LEDs appeared to indicate it was working properly. It's not the ethernet cable and I repeatedly tried reconfiguring the board but I was never able to get the ESS to respond. Usually when the connection is successfully made the green light starts flickering rapidly, but I was never able to get it to connect. Whenever I run the configurator (and I made sure that Mach and SCU were closed while running it), the best I could get was the ESS device to display under "listening for smooth stepper", but the IP address on the device was listed as *.*.*.*.* even though I had attempted to set it both automatically as well as manually. Initially, I received an error code and suggestion to remove the jumper from JP1, but there was no jumper connected. Then I attempted the fix suggested on Warp9td's website to run the configurator while the jumper was connected. All of those attempts failed to cause the ESS to connect. I also went through the option of restoring the Windows Firewall defaults and then followed the configuration process that automatically sets up Windows to allow Mach3 & Mach4 to bypass the firewall, but I was still unsuccessful. Does anyone have any ideas what the problem could be, and how to diagnose it?