I was meaning to PM you about it but got distracted.
I've been emailing EA's WONDERFUL tech support about the problem for about 2 weeks now They keep trying to blame it on a firewall even through I'm able to connect to the login servers the instant I delete my savegame. ..and just to humor them, I tried disabling all software/hardware firewalls and connected directly to my modem. No go.
By the way, if I were to totally delete my savegame and associate a new savegame with a brand-new EA account, would the DLC still work? I already tied the retail cd-key and the DLC to my first EA account and I'm not sure how all that DRM stuff works.