Why does gameranger recognize Heroes of Might and Magic 4 and 5 but not HMM3?

You may need to set up exceptions in your router and/or firewall to get it to connect. You may want to drop a line with the Gameranger people to see how it's going.

If you want to play with a known friend, I recommend using Teamviewer's free VPN. It's always solved all of my problems.

P.S. I use IPX wrappers whenever possible. IPX just makes connecting easy.

http://www.solemnwarning.net/ipxwrapper/