I've got the same issue as
this guy. Google search turned up a number of people experiencing the hang up. I wish I could post in the Steam forums but I just registered and I've been in the "moderation queue" for like 3 days.
The weird thing is I've had a very similar problem with Call of Duty. It worked for fucking... years, and then one day it just stopped. It's a lot like you described Imp, where on the initial load up the browser will do an ok job of finding servers, then after refreshing very few if any come back (also have this problem in TF2). And when I get into a CoD server after picking a team it's an immediate connection interrupted message and I'm unable to play. I've tried on and off for months and it's always the same damn thing, finally just gave up and said fuck it. Happens in CoD, CoD UO, and CoD2. Funny thing is I can play online fine in 1.0-1.4 but as soon as I patch to 1.5 the problems start.
It really is annoying when you literally can only get into maybe 1 server out of 100 or so attempts. Owned the game for 4 days now and I've only been able to put about 2 hours into it. And then when I actually can get into a server and play, shit like
this happens.
Here are screenshots of the above problem I've taken:
tc_hydro0000.jpg
tc_hydro0001.jpg
tc_hydro0002.jpg
tc_hydro0003.jpg
This is at the start of a match after a bit of a lag spike. We're all in the spawn point waiting for the match to start, notice half of my team looks like they're on the read team when we're blue. Also, when I mouse over them no nametag pops up which only adds to the confusion. Sometimes the classes are mixed up too, like a heavy gunner will have a scout model but be carrying a rocket launcher, and sometimes there's no model at all, just a floating gun. Insanity.
And here's a
link to an old thread that describes pretty much verbatim the problem I'm having in CoD which is sort of similar to TF2, 3rd post down by cfern. If anyone is getting stuck at parsing game info in TF2 and happens to have CoD, please install and patch to 1.5 and see if you run into this problem.
I have Comcast and I'm connected wirelessly via this weird Netgear one piece cable modem/built in router they provided us. I'm thinking it's probably the source of the problem, but who knows. A few of the games I can play pretty much 100% without issue are Diablo 2, Dawn of War, Dungeon Runners, and Guild Wars. Games that have been giving me trouble recently are CoD, TF2, and BF2. All of the latter games use some sort of anti cheat software like Punkbuster and VAC. Maybe there's some kind of hardware firewall being run by Comcast centrally or built into the pos modem/router combo they gave me that's causing friction, I really don't know... but I have set up port forwarding for every game and it's pretty much hit or miss with the exception of CoD, which never works, ever.