has anybody ever installed a certificate on iis5 and had it not load the page when they called https? i can't get this site to work with https otherwise it works fine, it even says the certificate is installed.

Yes, in a load balanced cluster on a server with priority 2.

What service pack is installed? What flavor of Win2K? Is the cert on a single machine only? Do the cert details match the instance of IIS on which it is installed (name, etc.)? Have any of the default trusted root certs been removed from the machine?