The new 1.6.4.3 patch introduces a network options dialog where you can turn off the MTU discovery feature (set it to "Compatibility mode") if you are having problems connecting, or even if you are having problems after being connected for a few minutes. This makes the network code behave more like it used to.

It may perform better when not much is going on, but worse when there are capital ships or lots of bots nearby.

This reminds me so much of one product I worked on for Oracle. He has a network layer selection dialog box for Mac ( MacTCP/OpenTransport/BSD Sockets ) to deal with some of our clients' peculiar network settings.

In this case it's mostly a response to routers (usually consumer cable/DSL routers) which don't trust lots of UDP bulk data and sometimes decide to drop it on the floor even though it let a few packets through before.

I still need more data to determine what, exactly, is going on, though.

Dr. Lecter - does this help?