I'm a registered worker for the pool, I get the same issue when selecting other pools, but I can solo mine just fine.

I'm hoping this is the right forum for this.

I've seen there is a bitcoin pool being run by xkcd fans (and possibly creator).  I'd like to join this pool, versus mining solo or any other pool. I've visited their page, signed up on the page.  I've set GUIminer as suggested in the getting started section.  but I'm getting an error "problem communicating with bitcoin rpc" when trying to connect.

I have Windows 7 64 bit.  I use GUIminer v2011-07-01, Bitcoin 0.3.24.  Bitcoin and GUIminer have both been added as exceptions for my firewall (Windows firewall) and the ports required have been opened up in my router.  My bitcoin.conf file has my user name and password set and the ip address tag set to all.

Any help would be appreciated.  I've looked up my issue on google, but found mostly unhelpful posts with a similar connection issue and no resolution unless I wanted to solo mine.