Weird AIM problem when direct-connecting

[hiredgun]

This is rather trivial, but I've been having a really frustrating problem with AIM lately. Direct connecting on Aim has worked fine for a long time on this laptop. This includes at school last year, and most of the summer at home. Sometime during the summer (I was on wireless there) my direct connections randomly started to drop out. Connecting works fine, we can chat and send pictures and whatnot, but then at some point after a few minutes the connection will be lost, and what's worse, neither side knows about it! (We keep messaging each other, and neither of us receive them, until somebody figures it out and 'closes' the dc for real). This has happened with to me with several different people, first at home and now still at school, so it has to be something on this computer. I tried updating / reinstalling AIM, but that didn't work. Any ideas?