Hi, Jimmy!

Thanks for that tip. I'm not NATted, according to that utility, although I
was fairly certain that I wasn't, since the 68.83/16 rests outside the RFC
1918 address space reserved for NAT. Also, I pay for public IPs, so I'd have
been upset to have discovered that the service provided wasn't what I paid
for.

In order to eliminate the ISP from the equipment string, here's what I did
next:

1. Isolate three machines on a LAN on a 100mbps switch, disconnected from
the Internet, and give them all IP addresses in the 192.168.0/24 with the
default gateways set as the local interface (this will cause the ARPs to be
propagated locally, and since there's no routing going on, this is exactly
what we want).

2. Attempt to create a game and connect from each machine to the other. It
didn't work. LAN TCP/IP connection looks for a game indefinitely and will
never find one. If I switch modes to Internet TCP/IP connection for
DirectPlay and specify an IP address, I get the same symptom I got before,
where a blank game is returned.

Now, here are some additional interesting symptoms:

1. ping works between all machines.
2. a telnet to port 47624 on all machines hosting a game returns a "could
not connect to host" error that would indicate a filtered port
3. all firewalls are turned off
4. A Macintosh appears to see a multiplayer game on one of the machines
(when it's acting as a client), but then can't join the game and returns a
failure.

Any more ideas?

This is very odd. I'm inclined to suspect SP2, which has made my life so
difficult in other ares.

Does Age of Conquerors attempt to use raw sockets to connect?

Is there anyone out there who has managed to get Age of Conquerors to work
with TCP/IP connections, either on the LAN or across the Internet on Windows
XP SP2?

Again, I could really use some ideas. I've got a fairly solid lab set up
here, and I'm willing to experiment.

Cheers!
    Nathan