This paper studies the vanishing of $Ext$ modules over group rings. Let $R$ be a commutative noetherian ring and $ga$ a group. We provide a criterion under which the vanishing of self extensions of a finitely generated $Rga$-module $M$ forces it to be projective. Using this result, it is shown that $Rga$ satisfies the Auslander-Reiten conjecture, whenever $R$ has finite global dimension and $ga$ is a finite acyclic group.