I had seen that suggestion in another post, and it hadn't worked.  I think there was another client using the port I originally picked because it is working now.
My original question asked about using Corba instead of calling the exe directly.  After playing around with it some more, the answer is to add that port specifier as a simflag option (simflags=" -port 12345")

 simulate(MyModel, startTime=0, stopTime=20,numberOfIntervals=500, tolerance=0.0001, method="dassl", outputFormat="csv", measureTime=false, cflags="", simflags=" -port 12345")

Did you ever get an answer to this?  I am running simulations through a .Net application using Corba (omc.exe +interactiveCorba) and calling the simulate command.  I would like to get the progress value back.