@pffan:
Gah!
What we have here is an instance of browsers behaving badly. I didn't realize what the problems was at the start because both IE and Firefox demonstrated the same behavior. Once I tried Chrome however, everything worked as expected. I think that because I had previously connected to the webGUI on http port 80 with both my browsers before, it kept pulling the cached page on my subsequent attempts and this is what was causing the redirect to https custom port. Once I cleared the history and cache, everything is working as expected.
Hopefully someone else can benefit from this information.
I did, I run into same problem, thanks.