Magento gives the following code snippet on their site, but I could not get it to work – souring the message boards didn’t really help either.  I am not sure if something was off with my installation instance or what.

After a bunch of trial and error – scouring the web etc – i was finally able to make a connection with the following script

<?php
ini_set("display_errors", 1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);
define("XMLRPC_DEBUG", 1);

require_once('../app/Mage.php');
$client = new Zend_XmlRpc_Client('http://www.domain.com/api/xmlrpc');

// If somestuff requires api authentification, we should get session token
$session = $client->call('login', array('user', 'key'));

echo "<pre>";
print_r($session);
echo "</pre>";

// If you don't need the session anymore
$client->call('endSession', array($session));
?>

one strange thing to note is the path to the API – with a trailing slash, i could not get this to work…’

I hope that this helps someone else out.