The multiplayer that isn't...

Argh! I played the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 free multiplayer weekend that Steam was running, and I was having a real blast. I really enjoyed the RPG elements, which are becoming increasingly common in FPSs lately. In any case, after much agonizing, trying to decide whether it would be worth my hard-earned dollars, and whether it would keep my interest long enough to bring its $/hours-of-fun ratio nice and low, I decided to give in. The game was already pre-loaded and required a quick 30 second download to unlock.

Of course, since I'm on vacation, I had other things to do around the house before I could sit down and actually play some more, but by early evening I was ready to fire up the multiplayer for a few rounds.

I fired it up and much to my chagrin, each multiplayer game indicated 0/0 players online. This was odd. So of course, I started googling likely culprits and solutions, and tweaked my router settings, which only made the situation worse because it would hang at "Connecting to IWNet". I was started to get frustrated! So I gave up for a while, thinking it might be a temporary thing and I ran through half of the campaign.

I decided to give it another go, and still no satisfaction. How could it possibly be that I was able to play, all weekend, without flaw, only to have it conk out on me when I finally unlock the full game?

Anyway, if any of you have heard of the same things (I know many people have had the same issue, but no one seems to have a definitive solution), please get in touch with me, because I'm quite frustrated and would only like to make it work.