FOUND IT!
Oh joy of joys.
Guess who forgot to add a -c to the checkcommands.cfg file ... basically, the nagios server was polling the NRPE client, and it was not passing the $ARG$ in a way it could understand .. as such, it was responding "NRPE
2.0" to say "yes, i'm here .. hello .."
Everything is looking *much* better now.
