Possible to do OPENQUERY without named pipes? When I try to do OPENQUERY I get an error about not being able to open named pipe, which makes sense because that's not an option (and isn't going to be an option any time soon) for the way the network is currently setup between the client machine and the server.

Does this mean that I won't be able to use OPENQUERY, or can it be configured to work without named pipes?
Most likely, the error is just because you didn't change the order for the netlibs to be tried on the calling SQL Server. It will then try Shared Memory, TCP and finally NP. If all fails, then you will get the error for the last one tried, i.e., Named Pipes.

I.e., this is a general "cannot connect to the SQL server" (from the source SQL server to the destination server) error and should be troubleshooted as such. This and this are good resources.

In other words, OPENQUERY does not require Named Pipes.