He wasn't looking at the network card config, he was looking at the serial port config. Which has absolutely nothing to do with his internet access.
Hayabusa: you should not need to have any ports 'visible' to the outside world, you would only want this to be the case if you were running any services on your PC (such as a web server or TeamSpeak server). In all other cases, you would not want any 'ports' (that is TCP/IP sockets) open on your machine.
When you connect to a service (like a website), your PC opens a random 'reply' port specifically for that connection, and closes it again when it's done. All this should be handled automatically by your PC and ADSL modem. The fact that you can access websites and the master server would indicate that this is working as it should. Opening ports won't do you any favours since the reply port is always random, but if you're not behind a router then it's not even possible to do so, a modem should not block any ports.
However, 'ping' is not handled by TCP, it is normally handled by ICMP, but connections to XMP (as well as the ping function I believe), use the UDP protocol. This could be the source of your problems, since all your TCP traffic seems to work (web site browsing, master server list, webupdate, etc.) but not any UDP (connections to servers, pinging servers etc.)
Almost all games use UDP for communication (since it's a connectionless protocol it's less reliable but has less overhead as a result), so check whether you can connect to servers for other games (such as Unreal Tournament, Quake, Half-Life, etc.). If you can, then UDP is probably ok and you need to start looking at (for example) uninstalling and re-installing XMP to see if there's a broken dll somewhere.
If you cannot connect to other game servers chances are: a) something is broken/blocking UDP communications on your PC; b) your ISP blocks UDP connections - if it does, I would say "get another ISP!!!"; or c) you have the world's weirdest modem that doesn't support UDP for some reason.
Hayabusa: you should not need to have any ports 'visible' to the outside world, you would only want this to be the case if you were running any services on your PC (such as a web server or TeamSpeak server). In all other cases, you would not want any 'ports' (that is TCP/IP sockets) open on your machine.
When you connect to a service (like a website), your PC opens a random 'reply' port specifically for that connection, and closes it again when it's done. All this should be handled automatically by your PC and ADSL modem. The fact that you can access websites and the master server would indicate that this is working as it should. Opening ports won't do you any favours since the reply port is always random, but if you're not behind a router then it's not even possible to do so, a modem should not block any ports.
However, 'ping' is not handled by TCP, it is normally handled by ICMP, but connections to XMP (as well as the ping function I believe), use the UDP protocol. This could be the source of your problems, since all your TCP traffic seems to work (web site browsing, master server list, webupdate, etc.) but not any UDP (connections to servers, pinging servers etc.)
Almost all games use UDP for communication (since it's a connectionless protocol it's less reliable but has less overhead as a result), so check whether you can connect to servers for other games (such as Unreal Tournament, Quake, Half-Life, etc.). If you can, then UDP is probably ok and you need to start looking at (for example) uninstalling and re-installing XMP to see if there's a broken dll somewhere.
If you cannot connect to other game servers chances are: a) something is broken/blocking UDP communications on your PC; b) your ISP blocks UDP connections - if it does, I would say "get another ISP!!!"; or c) you have the world's weirdest modem that doesn't support UDP for some reason.
