That first remark of mine was meant facetiously, of course. SP3 does more than just open a privacy hole (I assume).
My guess (nope, I haven't done the research--I had my child-like naivete destroyed by Igor's URL just today!) is that it's during system update that you're going to be probed, but that's just a hunch.
It seems likely that were you to successfully configure a firewall to prevent this system probing, you'd also prevent other more desirable activity or would simply cause Windows to refuse to function.
Anyway, I shouldn't indulge in this kind of guesswork in public.
WinXPNews (<http://www.winxpnews.com/>) seems to be a good source for this sort of information. If (and when) I really want to know, I'll probably start there. And Google, of course.
Good luck. Don't let the bedbugs bite!
Randall Schulz
At 10:51 2003-04-01, günter strubinsky wrote:
Thank you for the clarification, Randall!
Fred mentioned the firewall issue. I have actually zone alarm installed and disallowed -permanently- the Microsoft software (with the exception as the usual suspects, DNS, etc.) to contact outside. Now I am not so sure anymore that I got hacked by anyone else but Bill. My system started to behave erratically when I had outlook and other ms programs running:
The cpu was around 2-3% busy -never more during those phases- but everything stalled. (Including the task manager). I start to believe that those progs called home and waited for response from ms until they timed out which is why my system froze for about 30-60 seconds, execute a few time slices and then went into wait-state again. I have office xp installed...
Is there any info out how the snoop works?
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