Am pretty certain it is not a Firewall issue, the resident Windows XP Home one is permanently disabled because it clashed with the better Bullguard programme. Bullguard asks when you intall a new programme, so RB has no restriction contacting the net, just to finally check this out, I switched Bullguard off as well and started up RB from scratch. I also tried the update facility in RB and it informed me that no updates were available so it must be talking to a AirNav server.
Am using exactly the username and password on the CD, page 9 of the manual incidently shows that your email address is required here, page 41 shows your username is required. I have intentionally put a letter or number out here, and it will not start the programme, so I am confident of the correct login has been carried out.
When you click on the box "get flights from the RB network, the square changes from Red - Green. However, even with the modem disconnected, it still does this without any signal on the line, so that is not conclusive. The count down to refresh starts at 29, 28, 27 and then jumps to 4,3,2,1 which is weird.
The hardware seems perfectly happy apart from 2 lockups today, and internet is quite happily uploading my ShipPlotter decodes into the COAA server and vice versa, so cannot be anything wrong there.
I have to admit defeat, and will have to talk to support again. It is also very strange that I tried loading the programme onto my laptop which uses XP Pro and a Norton firewall, exactly the same results!
Cheers for now
Peter