Okay, so I finally figured this one out. If you are running windows xp sp2 (or any of it's variants -- MCE SP2/ Tablet PC SP2) and running Zone Alarm (any version) do the following:
1. uninstalled NVIDIA's firewall (I did it by accident)
2. went back to ZA 5.1 instead of the newer version.
3. disabled Http.sys by renaming it to Http.sys.old.
4. disabled DEP feature via boot.ini
5. disabled NVTCP.sys by renaming it to NVTCP.sys.old2.
If you want to follow what I did that led me to those five steps, look here:
http://forums.sudhian.com/messagevie...98&STARTPAGE=1