DrMcCleod

It develops as your GFX card (and PC vents) get clogged with dust. If the card cannot cool itself efficiently it will eventually fail and can be permanently damaged, so get the lid off your rig and give it a good vacuum clean. If necessary, get a cotton bud to clean your fan blades.

Install Wireshark and set it up to look at your network device & filter for UDP packets while connecting to a game (or receiving connections from others) this will allow you to see if the packets are actually arriving at your PC (and hence not being blocked by any upstream firewalls). Meanwhile, I have very similar problems connecting to ARMA2 online games. Sometimes I can connect just fine, sometimes I just get stuck at the server info screen. With all the other player pings greyed out. No idea why.

Either way, it wont harm to grab a vacuum cleaner, unplug your PC, open it up and give it a good clean. Pay particular attention to the fans, air vents and cooling fins on the cards.

I too am on Vista, I seemed to be getting more success by running ARMA in Administrator mode last night. (Right click on link, select Run as Administrator) but it might have been a coincidence. Either way, I couldn't connect to ACE games at all.

Cool, thanks.

I have the same problem. I can even see the packets arriving using Wireshark but cannot get past the server startup screen. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Very frustrating.

Can't remember the server, but it was set-up with a great injury system where there was a very long respawn period (4 mins) and a fixed number of lives but you could get revived by any other player as long as he had a medkit remaining (started with 5 or so). Injured players were shown on the map and by traceable by their shouting. It is a great system and there was some tight teamplay going on. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to filter for these kinds of games. Anyone know which server I am talking about, or how to find others like it?

In fact, I have checked network traffic while connecting to a multiplayer game with Wireshark, and I am receiving packets on UDP ports 2302 -> 2305 (and sending stuff back to the server). So I don't think that this can be a firewall issue.

One possibility is that your ADSL connection is unstable. If you can access your modems web interface, it will probably have a page showing how many ADSL disconnections you have. Check to see if this number increases after you lose contact with a server. You may find RouterStats useful (http://www.vwlowen.co.uk/internet/files.htm). It is a program that allows you to scrape data from your Modem's info page and display it as a graph. Very handy for spotting ADSL problems.

About 50% of the time that I am trying to join a Multiplayer game, I get the Receiving Mission File (0Kb / 0Kb) problem. I have seen the troubleshooter entry that suggests forwarding UDP ports 2302-2305 and this I have done. The odd thing is that sometimes I connect cleanly, and sometimes I do not. Does anyone know why this happens, and what I can do about it?

Go to Options -> Video Options -> Advanced and turn PostProcess Effects to OFF (or low, which I quite like).

I have a similar intermittent problem when connecting to multiplayer servers. Sometimes I can connect cleanly and fine, other times (~70%) the Roles window is empty and the other player names (and pings) are greyed out. If I click OK, then I just see "Receiving Mission File (0Kb/0Kb) and there it sits. I can escape out back to the server browser, but it is very odd why it happens sometimes and not at all on other occasions. I don't think it can be a firewall issue, otherwise why would it only happen some of the time? Also, I can see that my ADSL connection is stable over the periods in which it happens.