Jason,Just so you know, if you are behind a firewall that prevented you from activating on your own, then you could not have been deactivated. A more likely explanation is that the network adapter on which you were activated is either disabled or not available when you went into Visual Studio.
Regardless, the release next week, on September 22, have a completely new technology and license architecture. You can activate through a web service which will resolve your issue with the firewall.