Looks like my reply here would've been better posted in this thread.

My theory is that it's a combo of bandwidth chugginess due to Slammer and people trying to host 20-player games on < 1 gHz cable servers... but I don't claim any expertise. I do see less FPS since Gold and updating to the latest PB for the record, but that may be coincidental.

My lag is so bad it makes my fps suck  

Sometimes the game just plain out crashes from the lag ( I get a really big lag spike and here comes the access violation ). I know its due to my sucky ISP though. I call them, telling them its slow. They say, " We know its slow! We can't get it to run faster! ". As a result, I haven't got a download of over 20 kbs in months, and in SoF2 my netgraph just stays red/yellow/ and I can't go more than a couple seconds without jerking from the lag.

Sigh, the joys of getting DSL in the middle of no where. Its either that or even worse 56k by the same people.