I have connected to bill's server many times. never had any issue with busting and I'm not using COW (Netrek XP Mod 4.4.0.3 for Win32). I sent Bill my netrekrc and he tested it with that same client/version and had no problems and said it was due likely to my latency with dialup. But if this was just a dialup issue I would have busted many times on the netrek servers since I've been using this client for well over a year which isn't the case. I was able to login to bill's server this past weekend without issue. So maybe it was code in one of the fps patches that had an unintended consequence or a non-fps patch submitted between Sunday and a few hours ago which is causing this behaviour. Zach