>BTW, what's your take on disabling the XP firewall, if you don't mind my asking, if using another like ZA or MPF? I hear things, but practically-speaking, it doesn't seem to affect much at all whether XP firewall is disabled or not. MPF almost always over-rides it, AFAIK.

Just my opinion here, but it doesn't seem to make sense to run more than one. At best it's redundant, at worst there could be performance issues or maybe even actual conflicts between two products trying to do essentially the same thing. I am not aware of any reports of problems running them both, but my own rule of thumb is, the less stuff that's running all the time the better. I already had ZoneAlarm, so I turned the XP SP2 firewall off.