256k DSL is preeeetty damn slow. Ultimately, although you say its not, I would say that contributes. I have a 3megabit cable line and I still experience lag on some servers although thats usually just cause the server is far away. When was the last time you formatted your computer? Scrubbed it clean, or if you don't want to format, how about a defrag. If its not your internet line, then its the simple fact that somewhere something is getting bottlenecked. start up your computer and go into the task manager and see how much percentage of your CPU is being used etc... get a program like Tweak UI that'll let you free up some memory before opening a program like a game. That's about all I can think of really