Well it still looks like a work in progress. I drove home, fired up google maps..located myself ~1 mile from my house, fired up gpsgate, ok, fired up visualgpsce .... and it would not see satellites. Evidently the gps needed reset. I reset the unit fired up google maps, selected use gps, and it located me off the horn of africa as others had posted
Then I fired up gpsgate and visualgps and got a lock rather quickly although it took about 3 minutes.
Seems like there are two issues
1) we need a warm reset mortscript that would stop/restart the gps .dlls (dont know if that is feasible.
2) we need a cold start script that stores initial lat/long in the continental us as opposed to N0.000 E0.000 (which is where that africa locate comes from, plug 0 0 into google earth)
Technically, google maps is all that is needed, but visualgps shows satellites as well as lat/long. I still think it is valid that if you fire up programs on a comm port you don't get the benefit of agps. Of course that may be shot down as well
So my initial observations were at least in part in error, but at least using this method, I can determine if I am going to get a good fix quickly or not. Ill keep playing