I dont check in here often either. Its a shame, librepilot is actually great and tremendously useful software.
No, it was the normal USB connection into the flight controller.
As it turns out, the Norton Antivirus software on my field laptop just would not stop blocking, no matter what settings I tried, despite spending several hours on the phone with Norton. As it doesnt have a normal connection to the internet anyway, I ended up deleting the Norton software, and then things worked fine. There's always Microsofts antivirus built in anyway. My other laptop it does work with the settings I described. Not sure why the other one doesnt work.