I'm at my whit's end

[Shane]

I'm completely exhausted over this small issue which I just can't seem to get a grip on. I'm suffering massive packet loss when I play on Zandronum, however my internet connection is stable and I experience no lag on any other game. I do get a bit of latency on TS, but only when I speak, everyone else comes in just fine.

Before I continue, just some specs on my hardware I'm running:

Alienware X51 is the desktop Windows 07 as OS
it's key hardware for this issue include:
Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller
Dell Wireless 1502 802.11b/g/n (unimportant but I did use it's wireless capabilities for a test)
Nvidia GeForce GT 545 (still unsure if it's a video card problem, but I'm still wavering on that)
Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000
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The exterior network devices I use are:

Motorola SB6121 Cable Modem
Linksys Wireless N Router with ADSL2 Modem X2000

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This problem began about 6 weeks ago, right before the start of the IDL season. The issue is as follows:

On startup, if I jump right into a game on Zandronum, latency is fine, I can connect shots, move around the map as well and everything seems to be running fluidly. After 30 minutes or so, this drops down to minor packet loss, basically the equivalent to playing with 80 ping, after another 30 minutes, it's an entire hour of playing with incredibly terrible packet loss as it feels like my ping would be 300 while staying at a normal 20 on NJ servers. After this the next 20 minutes I see a lot of "waiting for server" messages until suddenly it ceases and it starts the cycle again from the beginning.

Now theres a few more games I play online, such as Quakelive, Starcraft 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, and every now and then a little bit of Killing Floor, and not a single one of these games show any change like I see on Zandronum.

Now let's discuss what I've done to try and isolate the problem:

At first I assumed possibly faulty connections, I checked the networks my computer was connecting to and realized a second connection was made without my knowing, so I promptly disconnected from this network.
This did not do anything for my connection.

Now I examined it as a software issue, checking Task manager and the resource monitor for any programs taking up CPU or donning one too many threads making my computer lag. I did find one malicious program called 'stij.exe' which I did some research on, and it is a standard Windows operating tool, but only if certain conditions are met, if anything else it's malware and should be removed immediately, so using Task Manager I closed the process and deleted stij.exe along with any other files it carried with it. This did not help either.

Maybe my computer was running out of memory and it wasn't being optimized very well? I checked the stats and I still have about 921 GB of free space left, so that couldn't possibly be it...

It's at this point I thought I should change perspective, I have a laptop close by that I usually let my friends use as to not fill my main desktop with a bunch of useless junk programs. I played 2 matches on my laptop and everything seemed to be just fine, no lag whatsoever. (Now later on my laptop did get some lag in a match, but I'll get to that)

So here I figured maybe my computer has contracted a lot of malware that has infected my core system files and is working under pressure, I did just get rid of a virus not too long ago, maybe it did more damage than I thought. I reinstalled my OS, but I did not do a complete format of the drive, I kept all of the non-system programs intact. This did not help at all either.

Sensible enough, I began to ask some computer guys of mine, mainly Watermelon and Jenova to see if they could help come up with something that might be going wrong. Watermelon proposed the idea of running my computer in safemode with networking to see if there was a problem with the hardware, simple enough I did and after 2 duels it was confirmed that yeah I was still definitely lagging.

Here I was stumped, leaving with only 3 possible answers to my dilemma, The Modem, Infected Software or Zandronum. In an effort to eliminated the second option, I reinstalled my OS again, this time formatting the entire computer with Windows putting it all inside a folder labeled windows.old where I took out atleast 2 items before deleting entirely. I loaded Zandronum back up, and I still have the weird lag.

After this time I figure it would be smarter to just do all my Zandronum games on my laptop, after playing a single priv(prive) game, I noticed the problem was prevalent even on my laptop meaning only one thing it's gotta be my Router or Modem right?

I plugged the ethernet from my computer straight into the Modem, and the issue was still there, I was about to conclude an issue with the Modem except if it was actually the Modem, how come none of my other online applications do the same thing? I mean Starcraft 2 and Unreal Tournament (invasion gamemode) are very demanding when theres a lot of units and/or players on screen, how come they're not slowing down?

I called my brother up after all this to get his input on the situation, and theres not much he can do if he's not physically here to be able to look at the hardware himself. The only conclusion he could come up with is maybe Zandronum is having issues reading my computer's hardware and could possibly be the cause of the problem? However if this were the case then I would of had this problem as soon as I downloaded 1.1 and not a while after the fact.

Which brings us to now, this issue seems to have stumped a lot of people and I have no clue how to pinpoint an issue like this, I've had plenty of experience before fixing framerate drops and any other minor and major network problems but this seems to have no loophole, no real foundation to it, it's just there and it's taken a huge toll on me as I'm genuinely getting frustrated over the fact my shots have become random coinflips and I can barely do anything in a game anymore. I'm hoping someone out there who is just a wizard can help me out here because I truly am at my whit's end

[IdeIdoom]

Actual processor?
Right click on "Computer", Propeties and check out RAM ammount and processor name and speed.

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http://www.theverge.com/products/x51-2012/5003
Nevermind. Here are the full specs.

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My guess is the ethernet card. Though I am not really sure since you did say it works well with Starcraft and Unreal Tournament. Not voltage problem anyway. It can't be the video card also because a video card won't cause lag problems, but FPS drops. The memory is fine. Hard-drive fine. I have an Intel I3 with lower GHz aswell so it's not that.

[Torr Samaho]

Is the output of "stat nettraffic" any different when the problems start compared to when you just started the game?

[Shane]

I actually have yet to take a look at that, but now I don't really need to.

Because you see, and bare with me, the problem just seemed to go away. I believe it was due to my ISP going flunky for my area, after a short internet outage (also calling Comcast support to hear them tell me about maintenance issues) the issue seems to have just vanished however tiny spikes still occur but nothing brutal.