Thanks for the reply Paul.
What you describe does seem to fit the issue. After the web service is invoked the first time (and times out) the connection always seems to work as long as you actively engage the web service. The connection doesn't time out until you close the browser or wait several minutes before invoking the web service again. The only use for that server is to host that one specific web service, other than that it sits dormant until accessed by the web application. I'll run that by our system admin tomorrow and see if that connection goes to sleep after a couple of minutes.
To help clarify the below (since I was getting confused trying to describe it...
) I'll call the server that hosts the web application Server 1 and the server that hosts the web application Server 2
To explain the setup a bit more: We needed two servers because the web service that we are calling will not install on a 64-bit operating system (it's a web service that was purchased from a vendor but is installed and hosted by us). So instead of re-building Server 1 our sys admin decided to build a new virtual server (server 2) that resides on Server 1.