I can't get updates, and there's a major one coming soon, and second, the game won't start until the updater has done it's thing. Now, in the short term, I found a way to get into the game without the updater, so I wasn't stopped from playing, but this isn't a problem I could ignore.
A couple days of forum searching eventually led me to the game's Tech Support department. back and forth we went, trying all kinds of things, searching out problems, etc. In the end, the problem appeared to have been that port 6994 was blocked...but my ISP wasn't blocking it, and my router wasn't blocking it, and we couldn't find anything that showed it blocked. This makes for a very frustrating situation.
OK, so, this morning, I'm awakened by
zombiedip's and Erik's alarms. I've had a bad night, dying moles hurting (speaking of which, I caught the one on my neck on my brush this morning...fucking OW. They can die and fall off ANY FUCKING TIME now, thanks). I try and try to go back to sleep, but to no avail. I'm laying there, feeling seriously bad, a weird mood, as in I'm almost in tears that I cannot go to sleep. My mind is thinking of running Ad-Aware and SpyBot this morning, to try and figure out if there's something that's blocking that port for CoH...and that gets my stomach and adrenaline going all over again. Finally, I give up and get up, it's a few minutes shy of 7am.I get online, start to read e-mail, etc. Decide I should go ahead and take my meds, and I take two this time (talked to the doc about these weird little panic-y feelings I've been getting, and he suggested this might help). Doesn't take long before that funky feeling jumps on me again. Eventually, I get to running AdAware, and I think about how it hasn't had an update in a long time, always says there isn't one. Turns out there's a new version, and the old one isn't supported anymore. Run it anyway, only find one unrelated thing (IE's home page setting, which always shows up because I have it set to blank, looks like a BHJ), update it, still find nothing. Go to run Spybot, find same situation, go ahead and update it. While it's updating, I'm thinking about how to compose a post to LJ, asking for anyone's help, and thinking of anything else I should try. Dawns on me that I have one more thing running on my system that I know blocks things, PeerGuardian. Shouldn't have anything to do with this, but for shits and giggles, I turn it off and fire up CoH.
It connects. Connects just fine. *blink*
Turn PG back on, fire up CoH. Still connects just fine. *double blink*
Now, the upside to this is that CoH seems to be working, and just in time. The down side is that I have NO IDEA why it's working now, what changed, or why...and that just drives me crazy.