Got my usb-serial port. For some reason the panel was reading nothing in telco 3 and called it a bad phone number which threw the trouble. (would have helped if I read the event log, heh) It wasn't even set to report to telco 3. Anyways downloaded the panel for the first time and no more trouble! yay!
I tried changing some of the keypad messages in the hexeditor and it doesn't seem to be downloading these changes to the panel. Is there a way to change these messages or not? The help files say "provided for debugging purposes only" so I'm guessing it won't actually change these entries.