UO connectivity problem PLZ HELP !!!!!!

[Wulfrune]

I've just built an Athalon 1400, with 640/133 ram. Everything runs fine, surfs the net well and plays games like Quake great too, but when it come to Ultima Online something well odd occurs. First off I've got a nice ping (highest 15 ms) so no troubles there, the troubles start when I connect up. What happens is, I log on, move a few steps, then the Ping stops, the computer freezes in game and the mouse freezes when I take it out of the game, I then lose connection, once connection is lost my computer returns to normal and the pings starts up again. I have been through everything that I can think of like reinstalling windows (me), formatting the C drive and reinstalling Windows (again), reinstalling ALL the drivers with new ones off the net. Running msconfig and shutting down everything barring UO and firewall. Personally I think that maybe it's the motherboard, the reason for this is when I first bought it, there was a fault with it, so I took it back to the shop and they said that they'd replaced it, hmmm.... I'm beginning to think that they've screwed me over.
As you can see, this is a mega problem for me, so I'm hoping that there's someone really smart out there who'll be able to help, ok then over to you guys, and thanks for looking at least and thanks for your help in advance. Wulfrune (London)

[Vesuvius]

First the obvious. Do you have the latest drivers for your motherboad chipset, video card, sound card and NIC? I would recommend reinstalling uo. Re patch (you can go to uo folder in windows explorer and run the auto patch only without starting the game from the icon located in the folder.) Then defrag and try running it again. If you can remain in long enough turn off the music, colored lighting and dark nights. If the problem persist download a program called UO trace right here. (www.blackcastlesoft.com/uotrace/download.asp) install it and run the trace to your particular shard by selecting it in the window, then press link test to the left of the shard window. Once link test is done click trace route. That should tell you where your bottlenecks are and I have a sneaking suspicion that you route through above.net to get to UO servers and thats what's killing you. Because I go through above.net and can't even think about playing in prime hours without slowing my connection down because of them.