- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Ever since I got the game I had nothing but problems trying to connect to live. However after experimenting with my network settings I think I finally found the solution.
First off, Microsoft's KB article located at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935310/en-us is quite useful, but there is one thing they forgot to mention.
If you have more then one network connected (meaning multiple connections to a single modem via LAN) you have to disable ICS FIRST! Then proceed with disabling extra network adapters and so forth. ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) is the thing that is causing major issues. Halo 2 Vista (or Games For Windows) does something rather retarded. If you have 2 network connections or more and have the firewall enabled, it will use the second network connection to try to log onto live, which in my case, wasn't technically connected to the internet. My second connection was plugged into a hub, which is shared with my 360 and Laptop. So when it tried to connect to the internet with my second connection, it didn't make it very far. I tried troubleshooting it normally to the letter through the KB article, but it still didn't work. Then I enabled the second network, disabled ICS, then disabled the second network again (since you can't access ICS settings with only one network operating.) and viola!
Hope this info helped.