Okay - I'm at my wits end.I have a nice new Dell with dual core, 4GB RAM, nice fast SATA Hard drives and an 8800 756MB card.Runs Vista Ultimate very well. Runs FSX very well, Runs FS2004 very well.However, neither FSX nor FS2004 can communicate with anything outside the computer.Weather, multiplayer - nope.The ID is a member of the administrators group - though I get the same behavior when using the Administrator (capital A) system account.FS 2004 and FSX tell me my computer is not connected to the internet - yet I can have a browser window open with the fs2k.zone.com site, the FSInsider site - anything else working.I can run other games in multiplayer mode and connect to the internet/ game servers.Both FS9.exe and FSX.exe are set to run as administrator. Both are set with NOD32 and with the Windows Firewall to allow access to the internet. The ports are opened.The FSHost FSX Client connects to FSHost servers just fine.I get the same behavior with the Firewall and the AV program disabled.It's not a router or ISP issue - a WinXP computer sitting next to the Vista box works perfectly.I'm sure it's something simple that I haven't enabled - but I'm pulling out what little hair I have left over this.It's really bad because I'm on the team at work deploying Vista in our corporate environment and updating our application installs for Vista.Any ideas?

I don't know how much help I can be with Vista, but I will offer the following three things:1) Are you absolutely sure that the correct port(s) are open? Go to the command line and type:netstat -an...and note the list of ports. (Hopefully Vista has these command line commands?)I do not know which specific ports FSX multiplayer needs, but that would be a starting point on an XP box.2) Make doubly sure that Dell didn't put something on your computer to further restrict network connections. Parental control programs, things of that nature.3) and the obvious, which I'm sure you have already covered, ensure that "Work Offline" isn't checked in your browser (what you see at FSInsider could be cached).If the above check out ok, then I would start looking at Vista's networking/application permission settings. On that, I'm afraid I can't be of much help R.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian