Its your overloaded (reminds of this funky "Sugababes" song btw phone line, Overlord (heck again! No wait...its OverLORD . Well, when hosting levels using custom tilesets, the game has to send relatively large amount of data. Press F9 and check the "send XXXXXX baud" status display to see that. When many people join at the same time or your iSP has problems or the lines just broke down or something like that, you'll experience the same exact problem as you described it. The game will freeze and it may take some minutes 'till it continues. In most cases, all players will be gone (timed out i guess). I have this problem VERY often because i only got iSDN (64 KBit/Sec.) and i often host servers with custom tilesets. My record was a waiting time of 15 minutes, then continued playing .

I also found out that the more people chat (specially long lines, lot of text) - the more likely is it to get this problem.

To sum it up, i think its a mixture of a game bug (well, bad network code and problems at your iSP and a question of bandwidth (getting DSL soon, yay!!!).