Consume an RSS feed using syndicationobjects

I'm trying to consume a RSS feed using the syndicationobject. (I'm using VS 2008)
my version is very similar to this example here: http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/a...ndication-feed

I'm facing a number of problems:
The function DisplayFeedItem never runs!
The xmlreader always comes up empty! i can't even read a news feed!
later on I need to know how to pass a username and password through to access the feed?
I tried using xmlresolver with networkcredentials objects. no luck

Does anyone have a better way to consume a RSS feed?
code attached...

Thanks,

ok, I'm not certain, but I think I'm being blocked by design.
I found a thread that says robots.txt is blocking me from reading a feed programmatically.
Can anyone confirm this?

I tried putting in a proxy with a port. no luck
I also tried putting in networkcredentials (with the current authenticated user) and it always shows up empty.

No matter what i try, I'm still getting the Forbidden 403 exception.

Does anyone have any ideas/suggestions?

Thanks,