Hey, you guys rock! 
Being somewhat of a computer :wally I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to get this to work…but now it does! Never ever in a million years would have figured it out on my own. Thanks!!! I’ve now managed to get my AoE tush kicked not just by one other person, but by 4 other people…11 (ok, in my favor here, I was the last person left on my team.)
Here’s what I did, if it helps, Green Dragon. Remember, I have a Linksys router, so it may be a bit different. I went to “Advanced Setup>Forwarding>Port Range Forwarding>Port Triggering” and then named one application AOE, giving it the trigger port range of 6073-6073 (for DirectX 8) and an incoming port range of 6073-6073. I then named another application AOE1, giving it a trigger port range of 2302-2400 and the same, 2302-2400 for an incoming port range. Now if I can only manage to get my other settings put back to what they were before I started messing with things, I’ll be in awesome shape. The MSN game zone now stops responding when I finish a game and try to return to the lobby. :smack: This is, at least, an easier problem to live with, though.
Thanks so much folks!
Oh, and Phnord? 14, dude!
So to get AOEII working, you need to name two different ‘applications’? This was my initial idea, but it looks as if I can only select one at a time 
Having not yet had a chance to test it I don’t know if I’m ok here…anyone know why it should be two different sets of settings rather than just the one?
Cheers,
DC
Yes, not quite sure why that is, but it was the only way I could figure out to get it to work.
If you get this to work green_dragon, would you mind posting what you did? I was able to host games until I got my Netgear router. I looked on the links in this thread, but none have the games I play, plus I don’t really know what I’m doing.
I gave up on my router’s dumb software and just put myself on the DMZ. The DMZ is usually used for worst-case scenarios because it puts your computer out in the open as if your computer wasn’t behind a firewall. However, the only reason I got the router was to share an IC, so I figured I’d screw the firewall. Anyway, to do this, you go to your DHCP Client list (assuming you have your IPs auto-assigned), find the IP that matches with your computer, enter the IP into the DMZ box, and apply the settings, and you’re ready to play.
So now I’ve got this working. I can play multiple people. I can host games. Everything’s good…except that for some reason there is one specific person I can’t play with. We’ll both be in the room with another friend who launches the game. I show up in the pre-launch place (where you choose civilizations, teams, etc) before she does. As soon as she shows up, I get a message that the game has been cancelled. This doesn’t happen to her when she plays other people. It doesn’t happen to me when I play other people. It doesn’t happen when our friend who launched the game plays other people. What is going on???