In the Vivado IP Catalog, I select an IP and then right click and choose the "License Status" option. The License Status dialog shows "Contacting License Server" error with no further information.
Solution
This issue only occurs in Vivado 2012.2 for IPs that do not ship a design Linking (simulation) IP license (e.g. Reed Solomon Decoder).
In Vivado 2012.3 the license status dialog has been fixed to correctly show license status "unknown".