Woah, sounds complicated...

Firewall is just set to block everything; I'm not sure if there actually is any more configuration than that. Maybe, establish Proxys? I never did that before, so I... probably won't tamper with it.

Thanks for all the help; I'm going to keep it bookmarked for personal use - although I'm unsure of toying with the default Microsoft settings myself. Navigating through the registry is risky, and altering the default settings for the running programs seems controversial... I honestly would love to go through all this for security purposes but it's hard to follow and it seems very easy to screw up. I don't really want to hassle people about what does <so and so> do? and if I did screw up in the end, I don't want to be yelled at for the errors.

I bought myself a book on Counter Hack Reloaded to see for myself what paths and exploits hackers usually toy with. Whatever the book suggests should correspond to whatever information is presented throughout these forums.

Thanks for the reformatting procedure info. I skimmed through tweakhound to look at the advantages of altering the settings for various things, and with that it seems like if I end up in the same distress as I am now, the situation wouldn't seem so... impossible.

I can't stop them from looking at porn. Too much of that stuff is out there :T

Because I'm reformatting the computer I am on now and the laptop, I'll apply the procedure to the laptop and just run through the typical one on this computer instead. I'll compare the two and see for myself the differences between them. Just a precaution, I'm going to run this procedure past some people I know and probably bug them about it...

-Thanks