Just some info for brand new players and potential future players.
For greater performance, turn down Geometry to low. You cannot notice a difference, but because the BF2 engine smooths the ground as you come close to it, having geomtry on high detail makes your computer work very, very hard.
Also, get yourself the All Seeing eye.
http://gamesdomain.yahoo.com/ase/register its a server browser. I tell you to get this because the ingame server browser, is a disaster (its gamespy, what you expect?). Its slow, and crashes often.
Also, go to your bf2 folder, go to mods, bf2. In there rename movies to moviess. This will disable the movies, which not only gives you faster loading times, but also stop a whole catalog of potential crashes. For instance, i couldent access my video card options without it crashing, as soon as i disabled videos it was ok.
Also make sure you play on ranked servers as those are the only servers that record your stats.