FFXI - Connection issueFollow

Here's an interesting little problem I've had with this game lately. At first the game will play fine, but eventually the following happens:

The R number in the upper right corner goes to 0 for 10 seconds (enough for the network percentage to drop to 94%) then it recovers and I briefly see the network problem bubble by my character's name. The R then goes to some insanely high number (as high as 6000) for a few seconds then stabilizes. Exactly 50 seconds later, the whole process starts again. R drops to 0 for 10 sec, etc etc etc. A 60 second cycle basically. I figured at first it was just lag, but after timing several of these events with a stopwatch I know there's something else going on. I'm guessing it's something to do with my dial-up modem (stuck with it for now, long waiting list for DSL where I'm at, nothing I can do about it) since I never had this problem with broadband. I've heard of people having similar problems when using routers, but I don't use one of those, I just have dial up after all lol. I don't know if my system specs will help any, but here goes:

Windows 2000
2 GHZ Celeron CPU
512 MB RAM
60 GB HD
GeForce 4 MX 5200 video card
U.S. Robotics V.92 56k faxmodem
USB mouse and keyboard
Your basic Ethernet adapter (currently disabled, don't want to uninstall it since I don't have the installation disk handy)

And that's about it, not sure what else I can provide. I'm thinking there's some dial-up specific settings I need to mess with, but I've already tweaked the obvious ones and still have this problem.

Hmmmm, I couldn't find anything called QoS anywhere, so I don't think that's the problem. FFXI is also the only app that does this (along with POL I think, but it's hard for me to tell.) I'm running Win2k Pro, and I always have my antivirus and anti-spyware progs up to date....... I think I may have just figured out what's doing this though. I'll have to reboot my system and reconnect to see if I'm right. Thanks. :)