Tiger Shark,
You make an excellent point and at the same time, confuse me
If I currently have my firewall set to allow Ethereal to do whatever it wants, there's still the problem of missing packets based on stateful inspection? Basically, the way my Ethereal runs now, I use it to capture traffic while I'm surfing around. It doesn't seem to drop any packets (I check my firewall 'blocked connections' log and it isn't blocking any traffic while I'm capturing packets). Now, is it capturing that information because the connection was initiated by the localhost? I'm still learning the basics to sniffing, so please forgive my ignorance on the matter.