After a great deal of re-wiring, re-fitting old cabling with new RJ-45 connectors, reconfiguration of routers and network interfaces, I finally found the culprit. Frustratingly enough, it's one that would have saved me about 3 hours of climbing stairs, re-routing wires, and stripping CAT5.
If you're using a Linksys 5 or 8 port switch, and you have one of the ports daisy-chained to another switch, you can NOT use the port adjacent to the uplink port. According to Cisco, those two ports (Uplink/port 4 or Uplink/port 7) are wired together.
So, in my case:
[Cable Modem] -> [Router] -> [Switch 1] -> [Switch 2/3/4/5]
The router connects to my primary desktop, my VOIP device, and Switch 1.
Switch 1 distributes to other areas of the house, where I have additional switches installed to allow for more than a single device. (My home theater configuration, for example, included a PC, an XBOX 360, and a DirecTV tuner which is internet-ready for video on demand and remote scheduling. All are connected to Switch 2, which gets its feed from port 1 on Switch 1.)
Point of the story: I had unwittingly connected a device to port 4 on Switch 1, which killed the uplink connection back to the router. Any device connected to a numbered port on Switch 1 then found itself without any internet connectivity.
All is now well at home, and I can focus on getting the servers re-configured to free up another machine for the garage. Uh oh... I'm going to need a bigger switch. :)
Hopefully this little tidbit saves someone a bunch of time and headaches.
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