The XP firewall won't stop a rouge program (or spyware, or virus) from
phoning home. It
only stop stuff coming from outside.


"Harry Krause" wrote in message
news:1102269099.4qsvEFS3LJXCi87mfPUrSA@teranews...
I fixed up my crashed server and also decided it was time to clean up my
main desktop machine, so...

I bit the bullet and did a clean install of WinXP Professional. It went
smoothly, with no error messages, and I've reinstalled the application
software I actually use.

I suppose this is only a sideways step from Win2k, which I had been using
on this machine. There are a couple of nice new features on XP that
weren't offered on Win2k, though. But not enough to induce anyone to buy
XP Pro. WinXP incluides a basic firewall which seems robust enough to
resist probes from the usual test sites.