well crap, wall after wall after wall. Turned on the debugging, and when it doesn't work, I get a big fat nothing in the shell, even tried putting the level to 2.

when it wasn't working, tried telnetting to port 80 and it worked fine.

I'm at a loss, perhaps it's something screwy on the work network, but since everything else works fine, you would think the route to the empeg is fine. not sure what to look at now, it's listed as a trusted site in IE. and netscape didn't work either when the webserver wasn't responding.

gonna have to try putting it on my home network and see if I still get the same issues. if so I'll start up a network sniffer and see what's going on exactly. thanks for all the help so far.