Those games doesnt work well in the Win2k environment. I had similar problems in Win2k but there were none using win98se or the first version. As for the outlook, I am not sure if its the service pack or some other factor.

I don't play those games, but I TOO have had nothing but strange problems since I did the SP2! My Outlook 2000 is as slow as snail mail now. Also, Outlook Express seems to take forever to come up, as well as download messages. And even my whole system's response time seems slower and quite erratic. In Rainbow6 Rogue Spear, every so often when I click on a selelction (like load plans for a mission), my system reboots on its own - never did that before SP2.
 
Just curious - has anyone attempted to UNINSTALL SP2 yet? Or is that just as much a fiasco as trying to revert back to IE5.5 from that damn IE6?

i did a slipstream installation Win2kSP2. Installed IE5.5SP1, after that i installed Office 2000. Maildownload with Outlook 2000 takes approx. 10 mins for 2 small emails .(

Did you check your connection to internet ? What is the respond time when you try to access a web site or ping a IP ?
I am running NT5 SP2 Office2K ... Diablo2 and it works fine
In your case, it sounds like a poor network connection as it happens when you try to use network.
Any messages in your Event Log ?
What about running applications without internet access like the game ?

The outlook express thing happened to me too after sp2,and so did something rather strange,have a look:
 

 
OK so its not a very big deal,but I dont like things like that,so I did a clean install.BTW that happened on number of occasions after only 5-6 hrs from booting and doing nothing really stressful
And Mike I think I uninstalled IE 6.0(2465)successfully after trying it a while back,but not sure-did a lot of installs lately..