fixed it!
I figured it out. It was because of my SoU and HotU keys.
When I bought my boxset, it had the same key repeated for original, SoU, and HotU. So I ended up keeping it as Key1, but I must have found Key2 and Key3 from somebody else (don't even remember from whom). And likely that person is playing on EFU:R, sometimes. This explains the intermittent nature of my problem.
While I was switching keys, I was only changing Key1 - for some reason I thought that was the only significant one.
I also looked into possible port/firewall/router issues, but there were none. I think the timeout issue is happening something like what Paha said: the server caches my IP/port and CD key, so if I come back with a different port and CD key, it gets confused (or just blocks me out thinking I'm an intruder maybe).
I did find this article about the meaning of the "Client Port" in case you have that kind of problem:
http://revisited.hidden-waters.com/index.php?showtopic=1401
By the way, Happy New Year ;)
I figured it out. It was because of my SoU and HotU keys.
When I bought my boxset, it had the same key repeated for original, SoU, and HotU. So I ended up keeping it as Key1, but I must have found Key2 and Key3 from somebody else (don't even remember from whom). And likely that person is playing on EFU:R, sometimes. This explains the intermittent nature of my problem.
While I was switching keys, I was only changing Key1 - for some reason I thought that was the only significant one.
I also looked into possible port/firewall/router issues, but there were none. I think the timeout issue is happening something like what Paha said: the server caches my IP/port and CD key, so if I come back with a different port and CD key, it gets confused (or just blocks me out thinking I'm an intruder maybe).
I did find this article about the meaning of the "Client Port" in case you have that kind of problem:
http://revisited.hidden-waters.com/index.php?showtopic=1401
By the way, Happy New Year ;)