Server Up! Yay...but..can't enter world

[Tegila]

So I got everythign working, made character go to enter world (the only options are tutorial and crescent reach as I make Drakkin almost exclusively) and first try ..i skip tutorial and enter CR...I get a big black screen at the time it shoudl be entering the zone. I thought maybe that's bc CR isn't one of those 30 zones that are loaded (still need to figure how to change that) so i close out and restart EQ, and select enter tutorial, this time I get instant blackscreen Disconnected, good ol' linkdead.

The only thing I can think of, and it's just because I don't know any better, is that in the config and login.ini settings it says to use one port and in the client's everquest.exe it says to use the other, could that be the issue ? (5999 and 5998 ) or does it have something to do with other ports that didn't get set up correctly somewhere? Firewall is off on the server altogether, I think I have it on on this PC though it's quite possible that's off too, but I can connect to the public eqemu servers no problem, and enter those zones of course.

What am I missing here? So happy this is finally working, but couldn't find with Search any of the posts I'd seen asking about this issue (well none that got answered anyway)

Do I have to just go in and force entry into one of these 30 zones that are autolaunched? or is it a port thing? and how do I make other zones launch that aren't those 30, or do they launch on their own when you try to enter them? The 30 zones are likely to be at least 95% zones that I will rarely even use due to the Drakkin thing, unless PoK and other PoP zones are part of it. (can count on one hand the # of times each I've entered another race's home city in the 1000+ days played on my eqlive acct lol) I'm sure it can be changed as I know other servers start out in zones that don't even exist on live, but how? is it something I can do with PEQ if it's not custom? if not, how do I make it custom if I used the autoinstaller, not the manual one with all the authoring programs?

Sorry for all the questions, really all asking the same 2 things: how to fix the blackscreen/ld, and how to launch other zones when i start the server.

Thank you

Update: Made random barbarian to try entering halas, no dice. no locked up black screen, no black linkdead screen, this time I got backtracked to the poll request screen I see just before server select, so it shouldnt be related to zones being launched, but still don't know what to do with it. *Second attempt entering world same barbarian, i got the locked up black screen.*