Well I downloaded ASE and it seems quite the resource hog. After boot-up and connection (only have dial-up ) I still have 96% free resources. But after opening ASE system resouces drop to 77%. And that's with only four programs running. Explorer, systray, Rnaapp and ASE.
system is: athlon 500 ( a little weak here)
        512 mb ram
        geforce 2 mx400 w/64mb ram
And I still haven't been able to join a game through ASE.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong but when I join a server it just starts my game and takes me to the main menu page (options, single player, mutiplayer, etc...).
Not that I can play multi-player with my 56k, I have joined a few games via GameSpy and had awful lag.