Well, I almost hate to admit it, and thanks everyone for the help, but I just pulled the biggest DOH I've ever pulled when throwing together a network.
Here's a quote from me, from experience...
"When networking, it's a good idea to actually LOOK at your cables before just plugging everything in and hoping for the best"
"If you plug the wrong damn cable into the uplink port, expect complications"
In summation, everything works. The second machine was sitting on the uplink port, not the router, but since the router had crossover cable they were still getting DHCP, but not each other
.
Xayd