I had this problem when I was trying to call a WCF service hosted in a new server from a windows application from my local. I was getting same error message and at end had this "No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:8888". I donot know whether I am wrong or correct but I feel whenever the server was getting request from my windows application it is routing to something else. So I did some reading and added below in Web.config of service host project. After that everything worked like a magic.
<system.net>
<defaultProxy enabled="false">
</defaultProxy>
</system.net>