'Whisper'/'friends list' communication problem

This is a problem I just began having this last week. Whenever certain people attempt to contact me in game using the 'whisper' channel, they get a message that says I am offline. I, of course, am not offline and am playing the game. However, if I open up my friends window I am greeted with a green reconnect button. Pushing it pulls up a message that says that I have lost connection to the friends server and I must re-enter my password. I now play with my friends list up permanently and have noticed a few other things. Whenever anyone on my friends list logs on or off, the friends list is replaced with the reconnect button. I have tried removing and re-adding people to the friends list, but that did not help. They were still unable to chat with me. I have also tried removing them altogether, but they still were unable to chat (these were all people I know outside the game, so we could walk through this over the phone to try to diagnose what was going on). They receive every message I send them, but I only receive messages from them on rare occassions. The majority of the time it just disconnects me from the freinds server.

I have already submitted a support ticket to PlayNC, and am trying out their suggestions; but I am afraid from their responses that they are not quite understanding that I am not getting disconnected from the game, only from the friends server. If I did not have my friends list open, I would never notice that anything was going on. They are having me check my wireless router / cable modem setup (which I will do tonight at home), but I have been playing for over two years without changing my setup and the problem just began this week.

Have any of you experienced this? Any ideas if there was an automated windows update that installed a bogus firewall?

I run a Dell Inspiron 6000 with Windows XP Media Center. The computer shipped with MCShield and Trend Micro PC-cillin already installed and they have always been running while I played before. I do not know the details of my firewalls other than that I have not done anything to them.

Thanks.

Internal game error. Sign out and then back in and you should be fine. This has been a known bug for years and apparently still has not been fixed.

I had this issue happen to me over this past event weekend. I was on the 9 rings and afk most of the weekend. I noticed my disconnect to the friends server as I checked my supply of tickets. Once I just left it set disconnected and came back later and I was connected again. I didn't hit the "reconnect" button either. Very strange as I havn't seen this happen before this weekend. Of course I havn't been afk from my system like this since the last Canthan new year event.

Tarun,
This has been persistent. I have tried logging out and back in. It has happened every single night I have played this past week, and it was always triggered by someone attempting to talk to me, or someone on my friends list changing status.

I did just update my firmware and some of the things that triggered it yesterday did not trigger it today. Hopefully it is fixed, but I will not know for sure until I am able to chat with the person that triggered this the first time and most frequently.

*EDIT* Firmware update fixed the problem.

*RE-EDIT* Firmware update did NOT fix the problem. Required specific TCP ports to be enabled and unrestricted on the router (80 and 6112). Working so far.