No friends online in BF2042 - cause & solution found

I was having awful trouble when starting BF2042 and it saying my son in other room who was trying to play with me on squad was not online nearly half the time we tried to play - tried restarting BF over and over and didn't help.

Found actual cause... its the EA app itself... you need to shutdown the EA app and restart it - that's it.

It appears this app controls whether BF2042 can see your friends or not, and not BF2042 itself..

This now works 100% of time for me.