GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

I spent way too much time this weekend trying to hunt down the game World of Warcraft. After hitting a handful of stores I finally found one lonely copy on a shelf at CompUSA Saturday evening.
The game has been raved about by far too many of my friends, so even though I don’t expect to play with it much I thought I’d pick up a copy and sign up for the free month of service to give it a look.
Well I’ve probably put about 12 hours of angry work into getting the thing running. It would start up but other characters wouldn’t show, or the interface wouldn’t work, or occasionally both of those would work but I couldn’t interact with anyone. Or sometimes all I would see is my character’s shadow in the environment. In all cases, I couldn’t exit the game so had to alt-tab out and kill it.
So I *finally* discovered that the problem is with my ROUTER. I have a Linksys WRT54GS, an 802.11b/g router with “Speedbooster”. Although this router works great with every other game I’ve tried (and believe me, I’ve tried quite a few), for some reason it gives WoW fits. After tweaking network card driver settings, rolling back video drivers, tweaking audio drivers, and going for long walks so that I wouldn’t throw the computer out the window, all I needed to do was pull the router and drop my old one in its place (a simple four-port Linksys BEFSX41 firewall). WHAT. THE. HELL.
Linksys and Blizzard are getting angry-grams from me, that’s for sure.
GRRRRRR.
Now I’ll take a few deep breaths and try the damned game.