I did finally figure out the problem.
I spent a lot of time going through my laptop looking at settings to see
what was different from my desktop. And oddly enough, just as I found it
someone posted me on another group what to look for.

Apparently when on VNC (though not every time as that is the first time
its happened to me) a setting in System > Keyboard > Mouse Keys =
"Pointer can be controlled using the keypad" became checked. When this
happens - your number pad stops working. Once I unchecked that -
everything was fine again.

As a note: I have used VNC several times since fixing it without that
problem occurring again.