AOK II Conquerors/Win2k - "Unable to join Game" error

This happens on the zone.msn and at home on the wireless lan. Weird thing is it worked for a while. In fact last weekend i played a game on the lan then went to play another one and got the error. Now i get it every time.

The error occurs on the lan when i try to join a multiplayer game from any other machine. I get the brown screen that it is loading the game (with the message about hitting esc if the game doesn't start in 15 sec - which i don't do) then it fails.

If i host the game on this machine the other computers get the error.

On the zone it is similar in that i can join a game or host a game but when launch is hit the same thing happens

Does anyone know the solution for this?

Thanks