Connection Time Out

[Randy Chrismon]

Splain this to me: I use my laptop to connect to the test-bed MySQL
server residing on my desktop. Using this connection, I can do
anything: load 200K lines, do complex (for me) queries, whatever.
But,
open a MySQL console connection _on the desktop_ where the MySQL
server lives, I can't do a desc table without getting the "Lost
connection to MySQL server during query" message. 
I've looked in the documentation and none of the possibilities there
seem to apply. It seems especially strange since the remote
connection
from my laptop has none of these problems. 
Any ideas will be appreciated.
Randy