Silly question, but is your login/password in the account table of MySQL? I seem to always forget to add it when I drop my database and rebuild. BTW, a decent GUI for mySQL and Gnome can be found at:
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/gmyclient
It's a far cry from character editing and other EQEMU functions available in the admin tool, but for some easy database tweaking (clearing tables, data edits, etc.) I've fallen in love with it.