My ping is ALWAYS in high 200's
Where are you located, and what servers are you trying to connect to? Many people going over an ocean to a server can only hope for around 200 ping. What kind of network connection do you have? Are other things sharing that connection, and (if you can) what happens if you disconnect those computers first?
Ping is a measure of network latency between your computer and the target server; it can be affected by local issues (CPU usage, high GPU usage and/or underpowered GPU, local network usage, bottleneck at network uplink, saturation between your connection and the upstream peer, distance and latency between your host and the server host, overloaded server network, overloaded server CPU). Some of these you can fix, some you can only work around, and some there's no way to change - but either way there's a lot more to debugging than just closing any IM programs (they're usually low bandwidth anyway and wouldn't hurt).
