So I recently started doing a bit of online gaming again, mostly CS and LOD. Everything hums along fine for most of the time, then somewhere between every 2-10 minutes I get a massive (like 2500-4000+) spike in my ping for a few seconds, sometimes resulting in a complete packet loss where the game either freezes or skips over a few moments in time to catch back up. I usually am humming along around 50-70ms but these random spikes are beginning to frustrate me greatly as they are typically resulting in missed kills at best and my death at worst. I've pinged and traced the servers and things look ok, my guess is I'm just not catching the network at the intervals that this stuff happens. Any ideas on where to go from here to either find the cause or possibly fix the issue?

Note this is on a DSL connection which is going through a Linksys WRT54G Router to my Onboard NIC in a Neo4 Platnum Motherboard.

do you have windows update turned on?

Yes I do, please don't tell me something stupid like that is the cause of this.

it was for me, I dunno it could be something different, but try playing w/ windows update off and see what happens.

Maybe someone else is using your network you know, or dont know about.

I doubt it, wireless connection is currently turned off.

Spyware, windows update, wireless isn't really shut off, router sucks.