Any chance that you are running Vista? I'm only noting this because I have seen this, even on mine. When I would load the game, the screen would flash just once with the Windows Firewall message, blocking the game. The fun part was, after clicking to unblock from that one, it goes back to the game, and never lets you see that there was a second message, for the same thing. And so, without seeing the second message, it still blocks EQ. Might just be my setup, not sure. The Windows LiveOne Care works very nice with Vista, but does seem to do a "double firewall"...just a thought, and some info for anyone else who may want to try to alt-tab at the login screen to see if there are some messages poping up as you login, or try to.
