Your desktop install you did a login server?
Laptop you are leaving as localhost so you can connect on PC?
Only thing here would be with loginserver you update loginserver2 to your specific IP but then you also set client to login there instead of EQ emulator host.
If you have PERL and MySQL and PATH all set up, you could re-run eqemu_server.pl to get a clean config file and just edit the name only and see if that fixes.
https://github.com/EQEmu/Server/wiki...t-Server-Setup
Seems like maybe something you adjusted and are overlooking, a fresh file may solve.. could just redo the whole folder even if the db is populated in heidisql.
As far as recent events the only time I've had issues where it popped up with zone is not available was when I tried taking an old DB (old zones for CT, splitpaw, LS etc.) and just started updating missing columns in various tables until it didn't crash (would say issues with starting zone and inventory issues).. so I did the quickest fix I could to those issues, and eventually it didn't crash it popped up with zone is not available.