Ok...
So I messed away the better part of the afternoon and am at a loss. I expect to just sally forth past this issue and assume something is screwed up in my environment.

I'm on chapter 6, creating a web part page with Chart Web Page (pg 221). All works fine with the exception of step (9) when I attempt to connect the list to the chart. I get an "access denied" error.

It gives me the option of signing on with a different user, but that doesn't help.

Thoughts anyone?

Hey ya'll...

I figured it out with a pile of digging on the web... Seems that one of the sharepoint accounts wasn't correct. I went through and switched the Farm account to a particular domain account. That seems to have resolved the problem.

The setting is in: Sharepoint Central Admin --> Service Accounts.
In that list you can set the Farm Account to a particular account.