just to give you other lost souls an update on what this dumba$$ (me) is doing to try and figure this out.
i only have very small amounts of time to work on this so i trouble shoot it for a few minutes every night. ...i have a 2 week old baby girl which keeps my wife and i very busy.
last night i found a way to get to my preferences by just going to a website and starting a download.
even though i don't have any ports forwarded yet and i haven't done anything with my firewall, i just started and i was able to get the ball rolling on the instructions i got from
www.portforward.com
i'll keep posting what i'm doing. at this rate i should have it figured out sometime next week.