Ok hours later and I'm still not up and running. Here's what the GM tech told me:
I need to do port-forwarding to open up all of the ports ffxi uses. He gives me a bunch of numbers (TCP- 25, 80, 110, 553, 50000-65535 UDP 50000-65535) and off I go.
So I scour the net trying to figure out how to do this and come across
this page which has my router on it. Get into my settings, crash the page and have to call 2wire to get it going again. The guy at 2wire is helpful but I can't get those number ranges opened on my ports.
So OK, I figure- why not just open the whole thing? What do I care if I have my firewall up while I play? I opened all the ports and fired the game up and still the same problem. Now I'm installing TOA on my laptop in the hopes I can get into my account and zone out. If you are an expert in this area and have some sort of idea what I'm doing wrong- please anyone offer your thoughts. Thanks.