Me and my friend tend to revisit DS2 every now and then, but it seems to get harder every year. We installed it again this year, and had no trouble getting the game to run on Win7, but multiplayer seems to be a lost cause.

We are both behind routers, but we both have DMZ and UPNP enabled and disabled whatever firewall/antivirus may block it. We also set the network device priorities (and disabled network devices we won't be using), and are using the dpnsvr=false command line fix.

But still, the game only sometimes randomly connects about 5% of the time and for no apparent reason. Otherwise we just get the notorious "failed to establish connection" when a player tries to join a host's game.
We're primarily trying to play on Gamespy, but get the same error in the other modes. If we try connecting through LAN/Hamachi, we can't see eachother's games at all.


Is it time to put this one to rest for good or does anyone have any other tips we could try?

If you are suspecting that windows 7 has something to do with your connectivity issues my recommendation is to buy another hard disk (they are very cheap).

Use the new disk to install windows XP to play your game and the rest of the disk space use as data storage. Will cost you like 20 euros or something, probably less.

I did the same thing and now with dual OS on my pc i dont have to worry about compatibility issues anymore.