soulseek 156c port forward grief

[Ocean Moves]

After several hours of frustration trying to setup
port forwarding for the use of Soulseek,
I have failed, so I thought I'd post here here
as a last ditch attempt at some technical advice
from one of you gurus..otherwise Im giving up.

I have looked throughout portforwarding.com
and soulseek website, and they have all told
me to suck eggs.

2 pcs running Windows XP SP2 (firewall is off)
Sygate 5.6 (switched off)
Soulseek 156c
both pcs attached by network cables to
D Link DSL 504T router (adsl is working fine)

My router has a gateway address is 10.1.1.1

In DHCP mode it is set to assign ip range
10.1.1.2 - 10.1.1.254

I first tried setting up the 2 pcs with static
ips, (10.1.1.2, and 10.1.1.3) - static ips set in
the router, and static ip addresses also set in
windows network settings.
then I set
a port forward to 10.1.1.2, where the soulseek
client is running, to port 2234 (set in soulseek)
...all successful, ips working fine, expect
in soulseek test it says the port 2234 is closed.
( and says closed when using this test: http://testic.demon.co.uk/slsktest/ )
re-booted pcs, re-installed soulseek. nothing.
still not working. internet working fine,
ips static, but no port open.

read further on portwarding.com, decided to disable
DHCP in my router, which i did. (so now it will never automatically
assign any ip addresses on my network, they must
all be set manually, right?)

tried a couple of different static ips for the
2 pcs, just for the hell of it: 10.1.1.205, and 10.1.1.206;
set these in the router, and set these in windows->network.
set port forward for 2234 to 10.1.1.206 (now the soulseek pc).
STILL nothing. Nada.
tried it with port 1745. Nothing...
in soulseek test it says the port is closed.
( and says closed when using this test: http://testic.demon.co.uk/slsktest/ )

WHAT am I doing wrong???
as mentioned above, Ive tried it with all software firewalls
switch off.
is it an issue with firewall in my router???
if so, WHAT exactly?

Please help if you can.