brick wall in front of globe
 

is this brick wall good or bad? If bad, what to do?
MacBook 10.4.7 Intel

Not so good. It means you have a firewall that isn't properly configured. Check your OSX firewall to see if it's turned on. If yes, then configure it as described here OSX Firewall settings for Tiger. Then relaunch LW.

If that doesn't solve it, then can you tell us:
1. Where you're connecting from (home, school, work, etc.)?
2. What modem & router brands & models do you have?

Wall still up.
1. Connecting from home
2. RCA modem

That's a cable modem isn't it?

Well it may mean your RCA modem has an internal NAT firewall. The question is whether it supports UPnP or port forwarding. Do you know? Are you able to telnet into the device?

I had a look at one RCA manual & didn't see any mention of NAT. But I don't know which model you have. There are apparently internet protocol filtering ... whatever that means.

Have you tried turning your OSX firewall off to see if you still get the problem?