Seems like you guys are having an even worse time than me then. Weird that we are having such different experiences of the same issue.
Also, unless I'm mistaken, connecting to the login server would be done through eqemulator and not p99's servers. I checked on eqemu forums and found
this post that appears to be the same problem. Unfortunately it doesn't offer much help.
I'm not sure where they got this IP address from, but trying to ping that one times out for me also. When I ping
www.login.equemulator.net I get 23.202.231.169 for the IP and it pings without issue, at this time. I will try again to see if this changes when I'm having trouble connecting.
All of this ignores the fact that when I'm having the issue and am able to get to the character select screen it's about a 50/50 chance that I get in and have some zoning issues when I do. These could be unrelated however. I'm not sure.