well, the chainloader idea was a good idea, and, although it didn't work, it did do something different. This time it said "error 21, no existing disc" Which I know isn't true, because if I go into bios and tell it to ignore all the other drives, it will load windows up just fine.
as far as "was windows set installed as secondary slave originally", no, it was primary master when I installed it, as, for some reason, windows didn't want to play nice with installing it with my nix drives installed at the same time. So I had just it and the dvd rom installed, changing it to the sec. slave afterwards.