OK, now that I'm done whining...

Fired up the POLconfig tool, it's flagged for access through the firewall, and I got nothing. Not one of the connections it attempts went through. That said, whenever I fire up POL it seems to connect fine. There is network activity there throughout the process until I try to fire up FFXI to get the latest version and it nosedives suddenly. Downloaded my latest video and network drivers, double-checked I'm rocking DirectX 11, ran CCCleaner...and I'm at a loss as to what to do next, honestly.