I've discovered the problem, here is a short description, along with how I fixed it, just FYI:

The error I was receiving was error 8002801d, library not registered. I had to log into my machine as an admistrator to run some other program, and forgot to log back out before I went into development mode again. When I tried it, it worked! Then I logged out as an administrator and back in as me and it didn't work. So it boiled down to a rights issue. I downloaded a utility called RegMon that monitors the registry and lists all action taken against it. I filtered it to return only errors, then attempted to load the page again, and sure enough, there was a key that returned access denied. So I went into regedt32 and found the key, and changed it's permissions. Now everything is working like a champ. Thanks for the help, folks.
jfh