Need for Speed Most Wanted LAN Issue

[Omnicent]

NFS Most Wanted is a great game, however when I attempt to play via LAN after I enter the LAN menu system the game stutters for a few seconds and the music/sounds stutter then altogether stop and the game freezes. This happens on 2 other PCs as well. I have McAfee, but the game has been given adequate permissions so that the firewall should not be an issue. Any thoughts? Has anyone else had this problem?

The other PCs are Athlon XPs on ASUS motherboards (both a7n8x-e deluxes I believe) one has a GF6800 and one has an GFX5200. BOth have 512Mb RAM and adequate Hard Drive space - if you think hardware might be an issue.

[The CandyMan]

So the game freezes only in a LAN game, and on all the computers no matter which one host the server? BTW that GFX5200 has to go, what a piece of crap, I got duped in to getting one, just replaced it with a GFX6800, much' much' much better.

The only issue I had was with my firewall, had to unblock on all systems the first time around, my server, and 4 clients, but other than that, it seems to work fine.

I would try installing the latest vid drivers and see if that helps.

[Omnicent]

Hmmm, I tried that, and it doesn't matter who serves the game. Through further testing I found that it doesn't actually freeze but pauses for 3+ minutes. After you connect to a game it displays a message indicating that it cannot connect to the other player(s). I'm stumped. The only thing I can think of is perhaps our firewall/router has something to do with it. It's a DI-624 latest firmware too, I think.

The 5200 is my brothers PC, he is replacing it, his old card died and he didnt have much money, so that was a quick fix for him.