If you've not already done so, Nefaro, you may want to try downloading & installing the 'Multi-installer' version of BOTF (you can get it here). I really want to play this again if it works better than last time I tried. The game was notoriously buggy in multiplayer, IIRC. One of those LAN games froze up near the end, however.

The long string of nasty obscenities one of my buddies flung at me, after I annihilated his whole Ferengi war fleet, still makes me smile. I actually had a couple little 4-player LAN games of BotF back in '99. If some mod or rebuilt version of BotF has pretty much eliminated this issue, then it's on! It worked better on Win98 long ago in the far far away. I think it was more pronounced with newer hardware and OSes than the older stuff, too. Didn't seem to take very long each time I started playing, either.

I always got sick of having to restart all the time whenever the game started slowing down and responsive got sluggish. I tried playing that again, within the last few years, but the damnable memory leaks just buggged the piss out of me. Wasn't there some freeware re-release of it? Or was that just a mod?

Star trek birth of the federation mod