NT / DHCP / HP Procurve

I am running NT4, using DHCP. I excluded the first 50 IP addresses. We recently connected 2 HP Procurve 4000 switches to the network which I assigned static IP address within the excluded range. Problem is, I can ping the switch but I cannot Telnet into it nor get access through IE using the assigned IP address. If I change the address to a number outside of the excluded range, everything works perfectly.
Is this supposed to work this way? Any info would be helpful.