All right. Glad to hear that that you got it solved. To prevent it from happening again, on the aperture ring there is a tab which slides over to lock the aperture ring at the smallest aperture.
This seems to be the solution. By default you have to set lenses with manual aperture control to the minimum aperture (biggest number) on Nikon camera bodies.
If you want to use the aperture ring on the lens, you need to set Custom Menu f9 Aperture Setting to "Aperture Ring" (page 327 of D700 manual)