Hey all,

Just tried to enter the lobby, get the spinning man thingy-filling up-with-blue-stuff (?) but then ..... grey nothingness. Does anyone know if there's a problem with the chat room?

If there was a problem, it seems to have passed Neb, I can gain entry fine....

Hmmmm, odd, Mine's still playing up. Might be some security setting somewhere. I'll have a play and try to sort it. Oh ..... and I'm still on XP ... don't trust that Vista stuff yet, me being old 'n cynical, etc

Thanks Wildr ... catch you soon.

Neb.

i can remember back on that whole 5th anniversary chat day we had where slip couldn't get in... i dont remember what his hangup was though. i think it was a firewall holding him back.

Thanks plur.

Did a search and found what you were mentioning about firewall and chat. My ZoneAlarm recently upgraded itself, so it may be something to do with that. I'll need to play about with it ... unless someone has done so already and can shed some light

Neb.

I give up


Turned off Windows Firewall ... turned off ZoneAlarm .... even turned off Virus/Spyware program (NOD32) .... but this piece of sh$t PC refuses to join chat

My PC runs XP (always kept up to date with the latest screw-you-up updates from MS).

Another PC I use (Win2K) works fine ... of course

If anyone has any ideas, please share

Neb.

I was going to suggest it might be the upgrade to IE 7, if you got caught w/ that one (which I did and now one of my PCs won't shut down ) ... but I just entered the chat room and left a msg, all with no problems ... oh, and this machine has some older flavor of Norton AV plus the Windows Firewall running, so it seems neither of those is a chat deal-killer either.

Wish I had a clue for you, Neb....

The chatroom software runs on Flash so you could try reinstalling that for your browser.

You could also try a different browser like firefox or opera which would rule out a network problem if one of them works.

If they don't then it's probably a network issue. I believe you need to have both tcp ports 8080 and 8081 available for the chat to work.

Thanks for the thought, MMe

Thanks for the ideas, Dan
I'll try that out. When I succeed, I'll report back.

Good luck. Hope it's not a fundamental tcp problem as I've come across a couple of those recently and the ip stack is so deeply embedded into xp that's it's a mare to fix - I had to rebuild the entire OS on a neighbours laptop just to get a wifi connection working recently

Network functionality seems to be fundamentally tricky ... I'll have all three computers running, will have transferred files, etc., then all of a sudden, when I try to open a folder across the network, I'll get the msg that tells me I don't have permissions and need to talk to my system admin (oh darn, that's me!)

Rebooting them all usually clears it up but definitely leaves me with that WTF sensation that computer users know and love