I used to have this shit happen to me all the time during games. It just stopped happening one day, IDK GL HF.

Ask SyncError or ins.

ins knows all the outs

Password in config perhaps?

Interesting, but no it's something else :(

what i find even more disturbing is the lag you get when someone else connects the server. i know this affects many people to some extend but for me i get a real screenfreeze for 1 second, totally screwing me in any infight.

yeah i still have this aswell. i got told to set cg_deferplayers to 1, but nothings changed for me :<

slow machine ? :<

q6600, hd5770, 4gb pc2-6400 ram, ssd disk

shouldnt be the hardware :/

ye shouldnt. ) idk then. a syncerror probably :DDD

Clear config.
Try without going through your router.
Check drivers and advanced network card driver settings.
Reinstall Windows.

If none of that works I'd give up.

I gave up in advance. Just was curious about what caused the issue. I should probably look that up on the ioquake3 wiki or something

It's got to be something to do with your net settings / network card etc. Basically the first burst of data from the server overloads your connection, then it catches up. Try setting your maxpackets to 30, see if the problem goes away. If it does, it's just a network issue.

Pedantic note: maxpackets minimum is 63.

Also it deals with upstream packets, not down stream.

You could reduce the downstream some by setting rate to its minimum of 8000 though.

ah, my quake knowledge is from Q3 :)