FWIW, what did MPICH say for the error?
I followed the install.pdf that comes with mpich. They have you start up the daemon ring then run mpdtrace. This command tells each daemon instance to report the hostname. I don't remember the exact error message, but it was very clear that NODENAME was not connecting (and could well have been something along the lines of 'could not connect to NODENAME'). I am (thankfully) unable to replicate the error at this point.
