Sorry,but I'm not that familiar with connecting to nodes or ultra peer etc,but when I reinstalled again & again I took notice of what I installed each time.After installing all the basic drivers etc(chipset,ethernet)bare minimum.Gnucleus 2020 worked better than ever.As soon as I installed sp2 it started timing out.Back to bare min again it worked perfect but as soon as I installed ATI drivers(which forces u to install .net 1 or else)(maybe time to change back to Nvidia) it started timing out again.
Like an equation when 2&2=5, it is easy to see what might be causing it, but difficult to find the answer!