First off, welcome to our little world.
One of the issues we are facing is getting back to being known for what we did under the SlideGamers name. We are a small group of support people, facing a huge task of rebuilding the CDROM clients we used to have prior to moving to another site that was hosting our software. And at the same time, we don't have the people to create some of what we had before, "presence-wise".
Because these are older games, getting the people from all over in, at times when others are around, seems to be the challange. The old "zone" days are gone, where there were hundreds of people online 24-7. So we have created a forum where you can post the times that you are around to play.
The CDROM lobbies all operate the same way, and how well certain functions work, depends on what the game itself supports. For example, the "join in progress" in some games, will take you directly into the action of the game being played, while in other games it would take you into the launching menu of the game instead of joining the action. The feature was made so that people who got "glitched out" could re-enter a game "in progress", without having everyone in the game being forced to return to the lobby and then re-launch.
Clearly, you need to have more than one person in your game table. Only those in the same table will be able to play in the same game. In other words, the table doesn't know about any other games being played, either here, or any where else.
If a game is launched with at least 2 players, and the connection(s) to the other players fail, then you are having a port issue. Your post isn't really clear on exactly what the problem is, so perhaps you can expand a bit more.