I finally realized that my 42mb sql file was mostly from a plugin that was caching huge amounts of info to my mysql file. i dumped those tables and got the file down to 7mb.
I still couldn’t get phpmyadmin to load the sql file. i finally just upgraded to wp 2.0.5 and used the db backup plugin to create a backup copy of the file and used that instead.
and it worked!
To this day, the only way i can get restore a backed up file is to use the back up plugin that comes with the default install of WP.