UPDATE
I went through most of the steps on this blog to force create a new user and turn them into host
http://blog.alecsalazar.com/?p=63 (I actually didn't get the results he expects until i went into dbo.users and turned the new user into a super user)
Once I got in that way I could see the event viewer and see the login was failing when it was hit our internal test CMS (we have modified our login module to create a cookie for connecting to another site). Turns out that CMS db had been refreshed the other day and wiped out the credentials we define in our web.config to connect to it)
SOO it was an internal issue, but I felt it could be helpful to a future user to link to the above blog, incase someone else needs to get into their site this way.
resolved.