heh, I think I got it… in the properties tab, the virtual nic had eset nod32's firewall checked and I think that was causing the problem. I reinstalled vmware while I was at it, so I can't confirm whether eset was the culprit, but I'm just glad to know that pfsense was always rock solid and this was a pebkac ;) thanks everyone, problems solved
I only noticed that eset was enabled on the virtual nic's when I was reconfiguring the vmware virtual network editor, and I noticed it said eset was enabled right next to the name of the nic. I didn't think that installing eset would of caused this. It's probably because I modified the regular eset installer so that it'd think it was a enterprise edition so I could get it to install on 2k8r2 properly.