Two issues-

The first involves hosting or joining games with a friend. We've been changing router and software settings for the past two days trying to resolve this and currently the only way we've got it to work is to disable the SPI firewall in my router. I tried forwarding all the ports manually, I tried setting DMZ and my friend tried connecting his computer directly to his modem to rule out any firewall issues on his end. We could join and play in other servers, however. I don't want to leave the firewall disabled, so is there anything else I should try at this point short of disabling the firewall each time I want to play?

Other things we've tried: winsock reset, disabling Windows firewall, both computers as DMZ, UPnP off, port forwarding, UPnP on with and without port forwarding, enabling ICMP requests.

Edit- I forgot to list the ports I tried forwarding, maybe the info I got was off: UDP 2302-2305, then tried UDP 2302-2307, TCP 47624, TCP 6073 and TCP/UDP 2234.

The second concern is minor by comparison. My copy of ArmA is by 505 and I installed the 505 1.04-1.05 patch then updated it to 1.18. Whenever I open the multiplayer lobby a message pops up informing me that the 1.14 update is available at www.armedassault.com. Any way to remove this message? On my first install I patched it like so - 1.04 > 1.05 > 1.08 > 1.18. In an attempt to remove the message I uninstalled/reinstalled and updated it like so - 1.04 > 1.05 > 1.08 > 1.14 > 1.18.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Edit - It seem I need to have the ports forwarded and the firewall disabled to connect to my friend or host. With the firewall disabled and port forwarding disabled we can't connect. Am I missing a port or something?