Strange connection/timeout issues

Hello -

We're experiencing a very intermittent but repeatable problem with a
handful of users attempting to connect to our mud. The connections in
question seem to be specific to a couple of collections of IP subnets,
and those connections just timeout after the initial
welcome/enter-your-name screen is displayed to the user. No input
appears to be received - the server doesn't appear to register any
input, and nothing appears on the user's screen.

The mud has more than 400 players from all over the world, and has
been in existance for a number of years, hosted at the current IP for
the last several months, and only in the last couple of weeks has this
become a noticeable problem. The connection issues appear to occur
with both windows telnet under XP and SimpleMU and other clients. The
server is running under linux, and has for several years without any
OS changes.

Can anyone offer any suggestions for resolving this problem?

Thanks in advance

Michael Sloan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]