well i figured it out, so ill leave these tips for anyone who tries to do this in the future:

1 - Content-Type NOT Content-type -- the T/t will muck up a lot of readers

2 - Hotmail, yahoo and a bunch of other places strip out object/embed tags

3 - view 'invisibles' little gremlins can pop up in code when you shift between a mac and *nix box

4 - never use any words with all caps in an email subject -- it'll trigger a 'spam detector' 5 - the closing boundary has a -- at the end word, homies