I need you guys to flex your "mental muscles) for me, please! Ive been playing an online game(Continuum) for about 6 years, never with a problem, until.. 3 weeks ago I had a "disagreement :)" with one of the game moderators. Ever since, I have not been able to play. The game zones all show up in red(offline), like the game cant see an internet connection. I cant even go to the game websites in IE.6. Weird.. I am dual booting XP and Millenium. All my problems occur in XP, if I boot Millenium I can play normally, though I always play in XP. I have removed, regcleaned and reinstalled the game in XP. Still it wont work. Could this game moderator have hacked my machine? And what could he have done? Could he have accessed my registry and fiddled with some internet settings or something?. I have scanned my system with nortons2002, TheCleaner, Tauscan, TrojanRemover, BitDefender and found no problems.

If I tracert the game server I.P. it cant even make 1 hop!

Sounds like not hack, but the OS problem. Maybe your game is not runable in XP.

Dude! I ahve been playing in XP for as long as XP has been out!

if it can't make one hop, then your first hop (your internet gateway) isn't returning your pings (or your computer is blocking outgoing ping requests). Maybe your firewall is blocking something. And for your info, XP has backdoors open by default. For example, do a search for "null sessions". So maybe it's more than a coincidence...he could have gone into your pc to change some settings. (i have antivirus and firewall running...i had to learn the hard way that XP is open and trusting).

I have closed Xp's "backdoor" with the patch and have disabled my firewall still no work! the only ping request that is blocked is the game server's ip. how could this be done?

dude ,well you go throught the internet right so maybee you got a cookie that is blocking you from accessing the web page and the game...............Try clearing your cookies and temporary internet and changing your user name for the game if not your IP is blocked