FFXI - Game freezes before connecting to worldFollow

Alright, this is basically my last hope of trying to be able to actually play this game. I've contacted playonline tech support as well as the online playonline tech support many times. Nobody seems to know what the problem is.

This is the rundown. When I first bought the game a week or two ago, I installed and downloaded the patches without a hitch. I logged in, registered my expansions and game. Made a character, logged into the game and played for a good 20-30 minutes, trying to get a feel for it. I logged back out to go to work. The next time I tried to log into the actual game, it froze at the character selection screen. I reformatted my hard drive and redownloaded everything, thinking something might have corrupted. I tried to log into the game again, and it freezes my comp again. I have not been able to log in since the very first time.
It freezes randomly from the time period between the character selection screen and actually connecting to the world (I get the chatbox and it usually happens right at 'welcome to valefor!') And it happens every time.
So. These are my system specs:
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CPU = Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz
CPU Speed = 2887 MHz
No. of CPUs = 1
OS = Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1 Ver 5.01.2600
Version of DirectX = DirectX 9.0
Main Memory = Capacity: 511MB : Free Space: 171MB
Drive [C:\] = Local Disk Free Space: 25.43 GB (Capacity: 37.26 GB )
Graphics Card = MOBILITY RADEON 9600
Type of Chip = MOBILITY RADEON 9600 PRO
Video Driver = ati2dvag.dll
Version = 6.14.10.6396
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Now, here's what I've done:
Tried to connect on dialup (the first time when it worked)
Tried broadband
Tried wireless
Tried disabling my soundcard
Tried updating/downgrading my graphics drivers
Tried reverting back to AOL 6.0
Got rid of all my virus protection and firewalls
Tried not using aol at all
Ran the benchmark3 and got 4181-L and 2558-H
Turned off the hardware curser
Turned off the opening movie

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So basically right now I am back at square one. I reformatted yet again and am in the process of downloading the patches. I connect through the internet using a dialup connection and AOL 9.0 optimized SE(I don't even wanna hear about dialup being the problem, as I have tried the game on broadband as well, and the first time it actually WORKED was on dialup with aol 9.0). It seems to be a connection error, as opposed to my actual hardware. I would really appreciate any help whatsoever in this matter. I'll gladly try ANYTHING, heh. I'm very desperate. Drivers? Ports? Change settings? only other thing is, if you know the problem, could you please describe in detail how to fix it? Laymans terms? Thank you so very much in advance.

All right, im feed up with this problem also.

Heres my specs:
HP Pavilion ze4500 laptop
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ clocked at 1.86GHz
512MB DDR-SDRAM
37.2GB hard drive, with PLENTY of free space
Windows XP SP2
any other specs you need, just ask

Scanning software:
Avast! antivirus
Adaware
spybot
spayware blaster
zonealarm firewall
i turned off Avast latent protection, and cant get it started again...

Anyway heres my story...
Ive been playing FFXI, with just a few quirks, nothing major, since june 05. I had a trojan get into my system and destroy it about 2 months ago, after rigorous troubleshooting and scans and re-imagings i get my computer up to par again. it takes me 3 days to download patches (Dial-up) and now when i get to character selection screen, the program shutsdown and i get a "send microsoft an error report" msg. (when i did send report, it froze) and ive tried quite a few things, including turning off my firewall and virus protection, reducing game resolution/graphics options, and restarting the computer.

anyway, as you can probably guess, this is very frustrating considering i am very heavily addicted to FFXI and i had high hopes of getting back on, only to have this happen.

thanks for your help in this matter

Edited, Sat Jan 14 12:43:26 2006 by Avist

Avist, what kind of graphics card do you have? The only thing that ties your two problems together is the fact that you're both using laptops.