Anyone else getting errors on startup?Follow

I've e-mailed EQ tech support about this and posted on the Tech Support Board at Live, but so far no one has offered any solutions. So I thought I'd check here and see if anyone else was getting the same error and/or knew how to fix it...

I bought the game last Saturday night, so it's been over a week now. It installed and patched with no problems, but when I got to the "Create New Account" screen it lagged so badly that the cursor was lagging 10-15 seconds behind the mouse movement. I hoped that the problem was intrinsic to the new account creation process, so I slogged through that and got my account all set up and everything... then I finally (4+ hours later) managed to get to the connect screen. After I put in my password the lag starts up again, and now I get an error 1001 (Cannot connect to the Everquest server. Please try again in a little while!) message, either before or shortly after I get to the server select screen. I haven't yet picked a server, let alone set up a character or started to play. Needless to say I'm very annoyed.

The interesting thing is that I've seen at least 3 people on the Live board with this exact problem (one of whom was someone who'd just purchased the game like myself, and the other was someone who'd been playing with no problems for 2 years) and so far a TSR hasn't responded in any useful way to the problem.

My system meets and exceeds all of the recommended specs; no firewall; no background apps are running (I've been doing clean startups in case it helps); I've deleted all spyware off of my system, or at least everything that Lavasoft Adaware can find on it; my BIOS has been updated this week as an attempt to fix the problem; and I connect to UO and FFXI with no problems whatsoever. I'm at a loss here. Anyone have any ideas?

No, unfortunately I am on dialup... if it's the servers, then there is no way I will ever be able to play the game anyway. :) I've tried logging on at pretty much every possible time of the day, every day of the week.

UO is Ultima Online, another online RPG that came out before/about the same time as Everquest... FFXI is Final Fantasy XI, another online RPG that is very recent, huge, and graphically intense (but not at all laggy, since so much of the data is client-side).

Thanks for the response though. :) I wish I could get some kind of answer from EQ tech support, either via e-mail or the tech boards... *sigh*

I've got a message up on the Live Tech Support forums, it's been up for about a week now and so far I've had no TSR response. *sigh* I've tried everything on the automated e-mail "common solutions to this problem" and the help database as well... no luck so far. Well, hopefully EQ gets ahold of me today and we can fix this problem.

What's REALLY going to annoy me is if they don't start my free month from the moment I become able to play. lol