Ok, so I was talking to my friends and have been running through the situation in my head several times.
Here's what i think happened...
Game was going great and we in sync UNTIL one of us had a blue screen of death...
So I saved the game and sent the file to both of my friends and had the other one restart the game so that it could wouldn't screw up for some reason.
BUT I left the game open and hosted the save file with the game open. This means that the state of my game was not fresh like theirs was.
So after we loaded, the game diverged and ended up very different and we were sad...
So I think that when they reloaded the game, it gave them a brand new state with properly initialized variables for the save game. The state of my game was from when I quit after saving our progress. Like the developers blogged about determinism, everything was fine until the state of our machines were different. And fortunately, I think this bug may be easier to figure out because it deals with variable that hang around after a game is exited and reloaded...