>From what I can tell, both of these are transfer protocols. How are they different? Why use one over the other? There is almost so much information available that I'm having a hard time sifting through it all to get to the basics.

Completely different animals. TCP/IP if a transport protocol; SOAP belongs in a much higher layer. Typically you'd use a SOAP->HTTP->TCP/IP stack..

Regards,
Viv