Actually, you would still be able to connect to a server at port 5998 even if your router is forwarding incoming connections somewhere because you will be opening a socket at different port locally and transversing through NAT. The only firewall problems that affect the end user is blocking outgoing connections, which tends to occur on your desktop itself.
Your next step after verifying the eqhost.txt file is to see if there is a DNS issue by performing a NSLOOKUP on the host, eqemulator.net. Open a command prompt and run the following command.
Code:
nslookup eqemulator.net
You should get a valid IP address back, current non-authoritative answer is 64.251.21.39.