After many hours of banging my head on the wall I finally solved it. The issue was that my ‘WordPress address (URL)’ and ‘Site address (URL)’ under the general settings were not identical. originally I was piggybacking off a friends hosting till I had my up and running, so it was daltonink.blahblah.ca/blahblahblaah
When I had my domain registered I had updated the ‘Site address’ but not the ‘wordpress address’, which was causing a security conflict when it was trying to create the cookie to grant access. Soon as I made the two addy’s match in the settings, presto, she worked.
Hopefully that’s of some help to you, sir – I can empathize with how frustrating it was.
