First of all, online gaming is not about skill anymore. Not even close. Those of you who "seemingly" do well and consistently put up good numbers don't fool yourselves into thinking that you're awesome. These days, better connections often equal more success whereas those with crappy connections like me have to make more of an effort just to put up decent numbers. Secondly, ping does not indicate how badly one lags or doesn't lag. Back in the days when I didn't lag i could play on servers far away in other countries and although my ping would skyrocket to 150 or 170 i could still play with no ill effects whatsoever. Now, that is far from the truth. I can't even get a game at a local server (where my ping is 40-50) and not lag. In fact, i commonly get beat by players with 150 ping or higher. It seems like they can hit me with ease and its a struggle for me to hit them. Playing with lag doesn't make things more challenging, it makes things unbalanced, ridiculous and puts you at a great disadvantage. So many of my moves/shots/actions do not register to begin with and the ones that do register are delayed by a second or more! An average player with no lag at all would have the advantage over an experienced player with tremendous lag any day. What good is having skill when it doesn't register at all? The fact is that LAG dictates the outcome of every game and changes the complexion of it by disrupting our rhythm and timing.  Every symptom of lag there is I've experienced to the nth degree in the last 5 years.

 I wish i knew the reason for this monster LAG, but I am not certain. I suspect an increasing demand for bandwidth thats just creating more and more congestion on networking traffic. Back in 2001 when I first subscribed to broadband cable it was relatively new and not many people had it either because they couldn't afford it or it was not available to them. My connection was smooth for the first couple of years and I had no complaints at all. Lag was a distant notion that I never thought about. Unfortunately that didn't last very long :\  About late August, 2003 that all changed. Since then, things haven't been the same in online gaming for me.

I've tried several different things to fight the problem, too many to list here. One of the latest things i've tried was switching to FIOS service when i moved just a few months ago. I had a glimmer of hope when i read how good, fast and reliable the service was. To my dismay, the lag is still very evident online (even with speeds of 15mb/2mb) and I don't notice any improvement over my previous cable broadband service. I am reluctant to spend $1500 or more to build a new pc from scratch as i've done in the past with no positive results. As of now there is nothing I can think of that i haven't tried. I dread having to go through another 5 years or more with this lag

Lag is my curse

Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.4Ghz on an Asus P5W DH deluxe mobo

2GB DDR2 Corsair RAM

Geforce 7950GT 512MB video card

Western Digital 80GB HD

Raptor 140GB HD

WinXP home edition w/ service pack 2

One thing that you mentioned about WinXP Vega, is that the network stack isn't optimized for broadband connection. I had heard about that before which is why i was considering upgrading to Vista because i read that Vista is better optimized to handle true broadband connections. However, all i've heard lately about Vista is that its still buggy and there are still many compatability issues which make it very unstable, so i might put it off for a while. I have tried the Killer Nic too. I returned it after not noticing any improvement during online play. Is there any other way i can bypass Windows XP's network stack? 

One more thing i'd like to add is that aside from increasing internet congestion I believe that ISP's themselves along with Windows are inadvertently making gaming impossible by blocking certain types of packets for security reasons. I have hard evidence to back that claim up. You gotta go back to August 2003, this is when I first noticed lag when playing online. It was at this time when a virus was invading and causing massive damage to networking systems and computers world wide. I think it was called the "Blaster Worm". It only affected computers running certain versions of Microsoft Windows. My computer was among the millions affected around the world. It was a pain to get rid of but eventually i got my pc working to normal. Alas, the online gaming universe wouldn't be the same. Immediately I along with many other gamers noticed the sudden onset of lag. I researched the problem and discovered that many ISP's, gaming servers and Microsoft were implementing tougher security measures so that an incident like the Blaster Worm would not wreak havoc again. Unfortunately, in their aim to make things safer online they disrupted the way information is sent and received which in turn created massive lag. At first I was lagging on quite a few of the gaming servers I never lagged on previously, but not in all of them. Eventually though, as more time went by I began to lag on more servers until finally all servers in all games became laggy for me. I guess it took a while for ISP's, Microsoft and gaming servers to update their network security. Sure, its safer while just casually browsing the web but now online gaming truly stinks. The timing of the Blaster Worm and the appearance of constant Lag soon after is more than just coincidence in my opinion. 

Lag is my curse