Friends:
Look, listen and learn. :(

I have ADSL and of course I use a router between my DSL Modem and my LAN.

My ISP is TELE2. They charge me for 1M/128K but my bandwidth is 512K/128K only. I have contacted their customer support several times to make them rectify the problem and here it comes:

In order to troubleshoot, they insisted that I connected my DSL Modem directly to my LAN Card!

Any argumentation about hackers was no good, unless I connected Clean from LAN-Card to Modem, they would not fix my DSL.

So I removed my host ATI from my LAN, enabled XP's firewall and connected it direct to the internet and downloaded Tele2's 500 Mb testfile.

Within 45 minutes my now, as it turned out, defenceless computer was hacked and XP just showed a window: NT Error, shutting down in 60 seconds.
When the computer was restarted cpu useage was 100% without Boinc running and outgoing LAN Traffic was at the maximum 128 Kbps.
I tried repairing the XP-install, but as soon as XP initialized the network, the hacker reentered my machine and prevented windows from installing.

Only way out: Reconnect machine behind the router, Reformat the HDD and install Windows from scratch.

This was the end of WU 316405 :(, 1 trickle away from completing phase One.

So: Never setup Windows XP while connected to the internet. XP's built in firewall sucks.

(Between us, I don't like Tele2 much either).

ChrisD

A similar thing happened to me almost two years ago. Installing the free ZoneAlarm protected my computer since then. No computer should sit open and defenseless on the Internet. (I believe the XP firewall only checks outgoing traffic).