Interesting behavior now... I can send the coins from the genesis block, but they never confirm.

The meaning of a confirmation is that a miner has checked your transaction and agrees it's valid.
My understanding is that the genesis block coinbase tx is unspendable because it is not indexed, as twobitcoins says. (I could be wrong on this.) So, you will never get a confirmation because no miners have modified their client like you have. When they see your attempt to spend it, they won't even know what transaction you're talking about because it's not in their index, so they'll never confirm it.
Also, unless you have cracked the key Satoshi sent his genesis block reward to, you will never be able to produce a valid signature to spend it, any more than you can steal anybody else's coins by hacking your client. So even if the miners knew what transaction you were talking about, they won't agree that you've made a valid signature for it.