as an update – i had to setup a mac book pro (snow leopard) in place of my usual system and figure this out from scratch.  i have the hardware connected via firewire; no MIDI cabling.  basically took these steps:

• installed the eventide h8000fw software driver & rebooted.
• confirmed that eventide DICE loads and shows up as a MIDI device in OSX audio/midi setup utility.
• ran the eventide routing utility, selected the H8000FW device under operations menu
• in the comms config, selected the eventide dice port 1. 
• finally, clicked on the "off line demo mode" under operations, which was "checked", then became unchecked and the utility connected to the H8000FW.   perhaps this is the not so obvious step!

good luck

-mike