This really stinks. The funny thing is i have run speed tests from different sites and it most cases my connection is superb. My Ping is never a problem when hosting games but when someone else is hosting a game and i connect to their server my ping looks like that of a friggin dial up connection. I frequent MSN gaming zone and GameSpy arcade and ive been looking for anything to help. Ive done some tweaking in control panel/network and i also downloaded this tcp optimizer utility which helped a slight bit but im still way off. Any help would be appreciated. In case your wondering i have nothing running in the background and i completely removed my zone labs firewall in an attempt for a better connection. My provider is aol dsl and people seem to slam it left and right but a buddy of mine has the same thing and seems to have no problems.

Chances are it's the servers you are connecting too. To be sure, trace route to these servers and note where the biggest delays are - these routers will be your bottlenecks. To compare, trace route to a non-gaming server with high availability such as www.yahoo.com and compare the trace. This should help you eliminate your connection and ISP and pin point where the latency is.