that sounds pretty much like the setup we have on my sons computer, he's got a firewall, antivirus program (thank god!!), his kazaa doesn't use a proxy, and he still got plenty of viruses, or virii, whatever. I mean, after all you are downloading files from god knows who, saving them onto your hard drive, and firewalls and proxies are not meant to stop a virus. They are invaluable security tools, but they are just not meant for virus protection.

Most of his virii came from downloading porn videos, which we eventually used kazaa's content controls to block. AVG is an excellent virus scanner that caught all the ones he did get.

So there is no short answer to your question "is it safe to use peer to peer network tools..." You are definitely still at risk of virii and trojans, despite the proxy and firewall. Add a virus scanner and trojan scanner to your list of security devices and i'd say you can swap files safely...

until the gov't shuts it all down