this is incredibly annoying. it doesnt take long, maybe a minute or so and i just lose connection and jump to the multiplayer menu.

AOL (i know, not my choice and i cant change it) DL ~300kbs, 2 day old netgear router, XP over ethernet.

please help me

can somebody tell me which ports i need to open?

29339, 63392. They should not be required to be "opened" though unless you have a fancy firewall that filters outbound traffic, or you are hosting your own server.

Wont be the ports being blocked anyway. If they were you'd never be able to connect initially. Sounds like dropped packets or high latentcy to me.

I've no idea how you'd find out what the server IP addresses are but if you can open a command prompt window and type in:

ping -t xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (where xxx.xxx etc is the server IP)

let it run for a couple of minutes and see if you get any high numbers or any lack of numbers being shown. To end it just do <cntrl> + C

Quote from gezmoor :

I've no idea how you'd find out what the server IP addresses

netstat -n -b

Quote from Dac :

this is incredibly annoying. it doesnt take long, maybe a minute or so and i just lose connection and jump to the multiplayer menu.

AOL (i know, not my choice and i cant change it) DL ~300kbs, 2 day old netgear router, XP over ethernet.

please help me

Go to Start-Run-cmd, and do "ipconfig /flushdns". That solved my and one of my team-mate's problem...

Quote from NotAnIllusion :

netstat -n -b

Forgot about that.

Do the command above. It will give you a rather long list whilst connected to LFS. When you actually log on to a server, one of them should have the State = Established. This is probably the IP address of the server you're logged on to. Use that IP address to do a Ping as I mentioned before and look for any dropped packets or very long times.

Edited to add - actually whether you get a long list of IP addresses depends on when you do the command. If you wait a bit after connecting to the server in question you should get only a couple of lines above where it says LFS.EXE the one that is Established is the one you wan to use.

I recently had problems with dropped connections on a Netgear (DG834G) router, contacted my ISP and they told me to upgrade the router firmware, there was a new patch released in April which prevents these dropouts - that might be the solution. The firmware upgrade is a free download from netgear.com's support section.

Quote from modelmotorracing :

I recently had problems with dropped connections on a Netgear (DG834G) router, contacted my ISP and they told me to upgrade the router firmware, there was a new patch released in April which prevents these dropouts - that might be the solution. The firmware upgrade is a free download from netgear.com's support section.

thats the exact router i have. btw i added a service to the port forwarding and its working now. not sure if that was a coincidence though.

thanks for the help guys.