Crashing during MP game.

[Armchair_Ranger]

I seem to keep either disconnecting or crashing when connected to my Host friend's computer during MP. When I say "disconnect", I mean that the game pauses and all I see is "Paused waiting for network data" indefinately. Meanwhile the game continues on for the Host but he'll eventually see that I quit on his side. Also, for some reason, my friend can never seem to connect to me when i try to host a game. But when i connect to him, the connection is instantanious.

Today I put my router into "DMZ" to see if that would make any difference. My friend still cannot connect to me but i can connect to him when he hosts. So we seem to be able to play for sometime without the network pausing the game. But a few minutes into the game I freeze and then get the message "CMSF.exe has stopped working". On my friend's side the match still went on but a minute or so later it says that i quit. Now I am also behind another router which is for my Internet Phone line. Is that something i should look into changing the settings as well?

[Schrullenhaft]

Any router may need changes made to firewall settings it may have. I'm not sure what an IP phone's router may have, but you will want to double-check it. It may account for the problem that your opponent has in connecting to you, but probably not for problems with you connected to your opponent.

You may want to start with small battles and see if you have better luck maintaining a connection. It's possible with larger battles that enough data is going back and forth that the eventually something goes out of sync and the connection/game is dropped (which seems to happen rather quickly). You may also want to temporarily disable some of your security software while playing so that it also isn't delaying some of the traffic.

[Armchair_Ranger]

Okay, so i didnt actually put my router into dmz, but my computer into the router's DMZ. Now I put the router itself under the I.P. phone box's DMZ. And then I set norton's firewalls to ALLOW everything for CMSF.exe. My friend was able to connect to me, BUT only After 3 whole minutes! The entire match went off without a single network pause or crash. Except for when my friend exited from the map and CTD'd. Still it does seem to work now.