thanks for the advice guys, as you guys probably know, vista SP2 broke client side extensions, i had to push it out via a dodgey batch file run on startup after SP2 was run.... it was a nightmare. consequently, RSOP doesn't work for vista SP2 and CSEs, group policy RSOP is fine, just not the CSE's. ran RSOP, nothing overtly wrong aside from RSOP not logging for the CSE's i've applied...
Anyway! Luckily! I found a solution after looking through the registry to see if the exclusions were entered, they were so this left me digging through microsoft articles, what i found was..... you turn off proxy settings for the gopher protocol.... voila! problem fixed...
