multisite subfolder dashboard 404

I’ve scrubbed google and these forums. Nothing anyone is suggesting is working.

I’m testing moving the community college website (i’m the webmaster) from frontpage (i inherited this) to hopefully cms. i’m not a newbie to wordpress, but i am a newbie to multisite.

At first i set it up on the windows 2008 iis7 test server. My first go round i set everything up with localhost/127.0.0.1 I do believe I could see all the multisite subfolders and dashboards like that. but my boss wanted to show it during a meeting.

So i’m starting from scratch using the server’s address 192.160.00.XX. Got it all up. put in a web.config file in the root directory, as specified by multisite final setup set. added the .htaccess to the root directory (everything is in a folder called webroot – wordpress is installed directly into webroot NOT the wordpress folder so going to the 192 address takes you to the site)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]

# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ – [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

i can go to the new site i made 192.168.100.xx/hr and the site shows up (sans any sorts of style sheet so it just goes down the length of the page) but the dashboard for the site 404s.

At first i thought it was a permission problem. nope.
deactivated the network plugins. Didn’t work

For the love of wordpress, someone smarter than me tell me what to do. I feel like throwing this computer to Timbuktu I’m so frustrated.