5punk

Could anyone offer any suggestions as to why XFire is losing its connection to the server while I'm in a game? Or, more importantly, how to stop it. I'm hardly getting any time logged because it drops after a couple of minutes.

Cheers

Is it any game, or a particular game?
It's odd behavior in any case. Try disabling In-Game Messaging (Options > Chat), I think that can cause problems for some people.

Other than that I think a trip to the xfire forums would probably be useful- it can't just be you with this problem.

I tried it with Counterstrike Source and Battlefield Vietnam so far and it happens with both, but I've had it open for a while out of game and it hasn't done it yet. I already had messaging disabled after trying to fix a lag problem the other day.

I'll have a hop over to the xfire forums though, thanks for the suggestion.

This sounds like a weird one, and it might be worth redownloading and installing the latest version.

Do you have any software/hardware firewalls?

The thing to do is to definitely disable messaging in game, however it sounds like you've done this already.

Failing that, I'm really stumped, as Xfire, for all it's little quirky'ness does tend to be very stable, and in general runs quite well, and is very non intrusive.

Let us know how you get on with it, and it also might be worth rescanning for new games as well, just incase it's got itself muddled up in some strange way.

Okay. I've re-installed Xfire and done another search for games, which had no real problems except that I've re-installed Windows since installing HL2 so there's probably no registry settings for it. It seemed to handle this okay though. I replaced the entry in ZoneAlarm in case it was my firewall, and I also tried a few things from the tech forum on the Xfire website.
It seems to be a fairly common problem and, after a process of elimination, would now seem to be down to my puny CPU (Athlon 1700 Palomino) not having enough time during heavy use to respond to Xfire's 'heartbeat' and so the server is dropping the connection. So basically I appear to be boned.

Gives me an excuse to upgrade to a PCI express setup I suppose.

Update:

I'm not one to leave a problem unsolved so I had another look. I put an exception for cs.xfire.com into zonealarm and that seems to have fixed it. Damn sight cheaper than upgrading too

Huzzah!

I only use the built in Firewall with XP SP2, which is probably why I've not experienced problems with it.
Shame though, you could still do with an upgrade

*celebrates*

I do need to change firewalls. I think ZoneAlarm's buggering up CS:S because I was spazzing all night last night on the Bukkake server. Unfortunately when I dropped it to see if anything changed I got invaded by worms so now I have to get rid of them all before tonight's game.

\Firewall blog

it only takes 4 minutes for your PC to become a zombie in some script kiddie's army.