A friend of mine has formatted his computer and put Win7 on it. Everything had to be reinstalled but now he has trouble connecting to online games (he tried StarCraft and Borderlands so far).

- He has the proper ports forwarded in his router
- The network connection is configured for home LAN (or whatever its called in English)
- Windows Firewall, Windows Defender and Virus scanner are present but deactivated.
- The only other network related program he installed is Hamachi.
- Browsing and downloading from the Internet works just fine.

He's starting StarCraft using chaos launcher + WMode but it doesn't even let him connect to a bnet server.
In Borderlands we see each other online, but he can't join my games (direct invite), and doesn't even see public games.

So at this point I'm out of ideas. Anything else we might have missed that needs configuring?

Run the programs as administrator, if that doesn't work, run in compatibility mode for a lower version of windows.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 30 2011, 9:28 pm by Sacrieur.

I remember on my other computer that I built (that was sent back ), SC2 and LoL would always crash when the ATT driver program thing was running. Does he have any of those graphics drivers running when he tries to play the games?

It seems that packets will be getting dropped somewhere along the line. The most obvious case is the local router dropping them through ports not correctly forwarded, however he says he's done that.

This port tester will check UDP ports, whereas most other port testers only check TCP, which is not usually used by actual game data. http://portforward.com/help/portcheck.htm
You have to run the program locally on your computer, to act a server, and then choose your port to test. It's possible that maybe he has only forwarded TCP ports and not UDP ports?

Also I thought I had my ports properly forwarded, but it turns out I only had them forwarded for incoming connections, but not outgoing - as a result in Starcraft I could host games just fine, but never join any. Turns out I had to enter the port forwards in a specific order in my router or they wouldn't work (on two separate configuration pages).

Finally, if all else fails, run wireshark on his PC to see what packets are coming in. This would give you an indication if he's not receiving anything, or if receives packets just fine, and transmits them, but it's the transmission that never makes it back to you. www.wireshark.org

He's running the games as administrator, but not in compatibility mode since I thought that's for getting the game to run at all / prevent crashes but has no impact on network capabilities. However it can't hurt to try.

The problems are unrelated to graphical problems or crashes.

I'm confident he has his ports properly configured as this is a very common requirement for online gaming and thus he's successfully done that dozens of times in the past. Also he has double and triple checked the port forwarding.
I'll recommend wireshark to him but I'm not sure if we can figure the difference between normal traffic and dropped packets (unless the program is noob friendly). Or if the program output brings us closer to the source of the problem. We'll see. If we have trouble making sense of it I'll come back to you.

I'd still recommend the port forward testing program anyway - it's just another thing you can definitely rule out. As I indicated, that program tests UDP ports whereas most others (including web-based ones) only check TCP.

As for Wireshark, basically it records the packets you receive on your computer, and also shows packets that your computer is generating. For best understanding of what is going on, you should run it on both of your computers at the same time. You can then compare the packet capture that you have on your working computer to the packet capture that he gets, and see if there are any obvious differences.

Basically packets are being dropped somewhere - either he is not receiving them at all (so won't appear in wireshark, when they should), or he is receiving them but his replies are not getting through (in which case wireshark will not show any obvious issues / missing packets).

How you would use wireshark for Starcraft, is to start it up before you start starcraft. It'll probably be capturing a whole bunch of regular network chatter, like windows directory services and any other programs doing stuff in the background. You'll definitely want to turn off any torrents or other downloading applications to try and clear out the chatter. Then, with wireshark capturing, attempt to connect to battle.net. You could try and do several connection attempts, just to capture more data and make it easy to identify exactly what is b.net traffic and what is background network chatter. Then stop the capture and save the file. Do the same thing on your computer, and then analyse the capture files together.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on May 1 2011, 12:37 am by Lanthanide.

Just for the record. StarCraft miraculously worked the next day and he had a bad patch for Borderlands which apparently had no side effects other than online play.
Mysteries solved... kinda.