Alright, I'm just baffled by this problem. My friend and I used to play Age of Empires 3 all the time. We both have Comcast cable internet and are hard wired. We live about 8 miles apart so I think we're on the same subnet. We took a break for about 3 months and attempted to play a game via tcp/ip but were unable to connect to each other. Neither of us had changed any of our hardware and we do not have routers. We both made sure our firewalls were shutdown and still no luck. We tried port-forwarding with our firewalls enabled using the ports the game uses and still no luck either. We can't even ping each other. We always get a "timed out" notice. I have no idea why we can't even communicate with each other all of a sudden. Any thoughts? Windows XP Pro SP2 AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0GHZ Venice Core Gigabyte GA-K8N-SLI Motherboard 1GB Geil DDR400 Dual Channel ATI Radeon X800 GTO Fireblade Edition 256MB DDR PCIE

Are you sure the IP addresses haven't changed? Life's more painless for the brainless.