Need expert LAN help

[dsplayer]

I have searched thru this forum and others trying to resolve a lan problem with DS2. Hopefully there is some expert here that can point me to a solution. Here is the background:

A year or so back, I had loaded DS2 (and the 2.2 patches) on my desktop and a laptop and we played via my local network and got half way thru the game before having to stop for other priorities. It all worked fine except the desktop was too slow to have fluid play.

I have recently reinstalled the game on two new laptops. I have applied the 2.2 patches on both laptops. I have disabled the firewalls/antivirus on both laptops. We connected via a crossover cable to eliminate any router issues. I copied over the game folders from the old computers. I have set up the Upnp on both machines in the windows setup.

I start up the first machine with the disk and choose lan and host and start a game. Then I pull the disk and start the second machine and attempt to join the game. The game says that communication was established but when I click on Join, it sits with "connecting to host" and says that the host has restricted pause (I have changed that option on the host but it doens't matter). The host game says that the player has entered and pauses. It does this for maybe half a minute and then the host game reports that the player has left with all of his possessions.

Sometimes I notice that before I join the second player, the connection speed that shows for the selected game is in red (poor) but other times it shows as completely green. I have not noticed any problems with the network cards and both have updated drivers. I have tried the game with a clean boot on both machines, with and without the upnp, with and without my router, and even with just a wireless connection. I just tried using the no-cd version on both but that didn't change anything. Both exe's are the same size. I have tried clicking ready on the second machine before having the host start the game. I have tried having the other machine host the game instead. All give me the same problem and show no other errors. What is irritating is that I had it all working on the other machines ...

Any experts with a solution?

JL

[fable]

Given the subject matter, I'm moving this over to our Tech Support forum. But it will remain with a redirect in DS2, so you get two areas of response for the price of one.