Hey jason,
As I noted above, I already validated that my firewall wasn't causing the issue, using that exact link too lol. I changed all of the ports to very random ones so there would be no conflicts. And read almost every article in that forum and tried every suggestion. I'm at a total wall now w this though I was going to try to uninstall and reinstall everything. Just not able to give that a try til the WA extension error I posted on another ticket/blog is figured out since I can't use WA at the moment. Any other thoughts?