Different BF2 probs

[EDB]

I've been having some issues with BF2. I dled the demo and occasionally would have "network connection" issues (despite being able to surf and IM.)

Bought the game and have been having intermittent problems loading it. I can get to the initial splash screen (where it says battlefield 2, and before it all goes black and the game starts) and then have it crash to the desktop. Sometimes I can get it to load from the shortcut, or by opening the cd and choosing start BF2, but other times it just won't work until I reboot....

I know it sounds like a vid driver issue (I have a geforce 5900fx) but I actually rolled back the driver (unistalling first, of course) and installed the one that came with the game cd.
I think it may have to do with the CD drive not being fast enough? But once I get it playing, its pretty good...

Also had problems with lag and high ping.. I tried to open port forwarding on my router for the game, but I don't always know the IP address in advance (it changes for every server I want to play on, so I couldn't see a way to easily change it on my netgear MR814) It seems to work fine without portforwarding anyway.

I followed the optimization tweaks suggested here: http://gear.ign.com/articles/626/626714p1.html
and it's playing well for those in fear.

I'm running it on a p4 3ghz, with 1gb ram, onboard sound and the geforce 5900fx...