Ah, sorry. I misread the first part this morning.

Some sections of British govt. are set in their methods and tend to treat everyone as though he is an employee working for X hours per week at £x per hour. One-man self-employed bands often confuse them.
Chris,
I'm assuming that a large-ish part of that $1000 is going to be to set up a new corporation. Have you thought about going off-shore?
I don't know too much about it, but I've heard that off-shore companies can sometimes end up being cheaper to maintain than domestic. Might be worth investigating, unless some other dept. insists that it must be a Fla. registered corp.