ok, i finally made some progress on this. Don't know why I didn't try it before but when I opened the same page in Firefox it loaded. IE is what is causing the problem. This doesn't happen when I open it locally in IE. I will continue testing and update this post as I learn more or someone please illuminate me further.

BTW, I upgraded msxml to msxml 4 sp 2 on the server. I'm using IE 6.0290.... sp2 128 bit