I've exhausted my knowledge trying to fix this one...

Here's the situation.

I went to GRC.com to do a port scan to make sure everything is ship shape with my firewall and security. GRC's scan reports that ports 1029&1030 are open.

Fine, then. I set up my firewall (ZoneAlarm Security Suite) to block incoming TCP and UDP requests to those ports. No luck. I forced ZoneAlarm to allow Windows Firewall (it's disabled by default) and activated it. No luck. I ran the ZoneAlarm AV and AS scans and also ran the Symantec online scans. Again, no luck (no infections or spyware found). I disabled DCOM and related activities thru a macro program aquired from GRC. No luck.

Something is obviously holding those two ports open. What could it be? I've looked at the svchost.exe processes in the task manager. There are at least a half dozen of them, but I'm not sure what exactly they are doing. 2 of them are "Network Services", but I'm not sure what applications could be using them.

Using Vista Home Premium. What I wonder is...how can an OS override the rules in my firewall? (If that is what's happening)

Anyone with similar experiences/advice for me?

O