@kongondo, thank you for your help. Basically what it boiled down to was my ignorance. lol. And my lack of patience and/or eagerness to continue development instead of reading instructions. But incase anyone that visits this thread is experiencing the same problems, here you go:
So first off, if you want to use a remote MySQL database when developing locally you need to make sure that you create the DB so that you have outside access (this is an advanced option with godaddy). Once you do this, it is relatively straightforward. Just plug in your DB information into the config file and you should be okay. Even with relatively stock my.ini settings in the XAMPP config it seems to work...
As for the reason its not loading on the live server, its because I failed to read the email that godaddy sent saying that the ftp server is ready, but my files/site won't be visible for another 24-28 hours... Hopefully it will work shortly.
Anyways thanks again @kongondo for the help...
