Well this was weird. With the new NTA being on a separate server we uninstalled NTA entirely from our pollers with the intention of reinstalling later, and even though the windows control panel reporting that NTA was uninstalled, it was still on the system. I've never been one to "reboot and ask questions later" so I worked the problem till point of frustration. Finally at the end of my rope I rebooted the additional poller and the NTA install reappeared in the windows control panel. I uninstalled it again, rebooted again, re-ran configuration wizard on both the main and the additional and now the pollers stay sync'd
chalk this one up to just plain weird.