Shipping not available in your area?

Through the setup and test process, I have encountered an interesting error. When I procede to the checkout page with a 'dummy' order, using my home address as the shipping address, with UPS Ground as the shipping choice, it is telling me that 'Sorry, we are not shipping to your region at this time' and I should contact myself for other options. What did I miss? I cant even find my answer in the book by Hoek.....

That's a result of you having placed restrictions on the available shipping options, probably zone-related.
Edit your shipping module's settings, and in the "Zone" field, set it to '--None--'. Then it should show up.
Or, maybe you've disabled all the applicable services in that shipping module, and the quotes that are coming back are saying that service isn't available for the zip-code-to-zip-code you've set.

What I found was, the free shipping module I had set up for the free downloads was colliding with the UPS shipping module on a mixed shopping cart. After defining the correct setting in the product and configuring the free shipper for a weight of 0 everything worked fine.

What shipping module(s) did you have setup?

The shipping module(s) that come with Zen Cart are friends and know how to work together when the Products are setup correctly and the shipping modules are setup correctly ... :unsure:

yeah, they're friends and work together well when conflicting flags are not set! lol The modules in question are 'free shipper' and 'UPS'...

The issue was with the flags in the product listing. If you have 'always free shipping' flagged on a downloadable product with a shipping weight of 0(zero), and have a combined cart with a total shipping weight of, say, 5 lbs, then the shopping cart tries to ship free(because of the download) and shuts off the UPS module, but, because the second item in the cart weighs 5lbs, the free shipper shuts down. With both modules effectively shut down, there was no shipping available(kinda funny when you think about it!)

If you select the 'mixed cart' option in the product database, everything is happy because aparrently that option shuts off the free shipper if a second or subsequent cart item weighs more than 0 which activates the UPS shipper. And that in turn makes all happy again in Zen-Cart-Ville!

This just goes to show that no matter how well engineered something is, someone can set an incorrect flag and make it not work. :)

Download Products are not suppose to be marked as Always Free Shipping and are not suppose to be marked as Virtual Products ...

This will mark them twice as Free Shipping and an Always Free Shipping setting makes the code think something should be shipped ... even if it is free ...

If you don't mark a download product as "Always Free Shipping," will it still show up in the customer's download area?

Yes ... Download Products know that they are Free Shipping because of the filename on the Attribute and you will notice that the checkout_shipping is actually skipped because it "knows" there isn't a shipping involved ...