[Bozos of Bones]

You probably have Service Pack 1 installed. The Service Pack 2 includes various security additions to the XP system. A firewall, some pop-up blockers and the like. The tools themselves aren't better than commercial, or even personal firewalls and blockers, but this is designed to be robust and stabile, and I've never considered that I'd ever say that Micro$pft made something stabile. Your system will load a few seconds slower, use more physical memory and may reduce performance on slow-processor machines(<400) but the trade-off is in a good last line of defense security. If for nothing, the firewall is worth installing as it is incorporated into the system itself and therefor more difficult to bypass or deactivate.
What shamrock said is true, navigating it is a bit more of a pain, but most of the options are twakable in various settings menus.

[ 11-03-2004, 09:53 AM: Message edited by: Bozos of Bones ]