Thanks, Spock. We were aware of the open ports (i'd been doing "netstat" stuff since 1997 or so, although not always on a windows computer), but some geniuses kept disabling the Zone Alarm stuff. Even at that, all the holes in Internet Exploder and Outlook Express allowed other junk in.

This is only, only my opinion, but even today I'll take Mac OS X over win xp without hesitation. I simply do not trust the basic structure of windows, especially since port status is only part of the picture.