Difficulty with an OPC connection

First let me start by saying this is my first experience working with OPC. I certainly hope it is my last, as it has been rather difficult.

I have a vision system running an OPC server which I am trying to connect to. The vision system uses opc core if that helps. I’m fairly certain I have permissions defined correctly on the server computer. All administrators have full access and I can use an opc client to connect to it by specifying the correct progid and IP address. It also appears to broadcast a serial stream on port 13000 using delimeters ‘,’ and ‘-1’. More about that later.

I have tried two things with little or no luck.
I tried setting up a com connection using the IP and progid. the end result is a faulted connection which results in this

COM object method returns error code: 0x80070005; E_ACCESSDENIED (Access is denied.)

I’m not sure what I haven’t checked on the server side. the dcom server was set up as specified in the instruction. The only thing different, and my IT guy doesn’t seem to think this will matter is that in the opc server dcom properties under the identity tab the instructions recommend having “The Launching User” checked, however since this is on a domain the only available options are “This User”, or “System Account”. I tried the latter of the two. the former seems to generate a strange error.

The second thing I tried was something I stumbled upon on accident and had no idea if it would work. I saw something about port 13000 a while back and opened a raw connection to the vision system IP, port 13000 with Putty. The output was a plain text bitstream of info. I actually expected there to be more, but it was something. Under the OPC-UA options I created a TCP device using a field delimiter of ‘,’ and a message delimiter of ‘-1’. This was successful. however I’m not sure what to do with it or if I can do anything with it. I tried creating an OPC-UA connection to it. It didn’t work.

Any ideas?