OpenVpn connection problem with secret key

[mazda]

Hi every body. I have been working 2 days to establish a connection between my windows as client to my linux vps with openvpn but still have some problems. here is my problem:
I simply run this command on server:
openvpn --ifconfig 10.200.0.1 10.200.0.2 --dev tun
and this command on the client:
openvpn --ifconfig 10.200.0.2 10.200.0.1 --dev tun --remote <my-server-ip>

and it worked well,i.e. I could ping 10.200.0.1 from client.

but whenever I use a secret key it wont work!
server:
openvpn --ifconfig 10.200.0.1 10.200.0.2 --dev tun --secret secret.key
client:
openvpn --ifconfig 10.200.0.2 10.200.0.1 --dev tun --secret secret.key --remote <my-server-ip>

the secret key is generated by openvpn and is the same for both. and even linux firewall is off by :
service iptables stop
in this case it just hangs on " UDPv4 link remote: <my-ip> ..."
and I just notices with --verb 7 that it says:
" NOTE: failed to obtain options consistency info from peer -- this could occur if the remote peer is running a version of OpenVPN before 1.5-beta8 or if there is a network connectivity problem, and will not necessarily prevent OpenVPN from running (0 bytes received
ta channel traffic) -- you can disable the options consistency check with --disable-occ."

any idea to solve this problem?
Thanks.

[janjust]

• make sure all openvpn processes are stopped on both ends.
  rerun your test with '--verb 5' added
  post the log file here