I only have one firewall running that I am aware of. Windows XP firewall is definately turned off. I had za running, but I experienced the aforementioned problem, so I uninstalled it. It was then that I installed outpost. And outpost is displaying the same properties.
For the record, I have yet to purge the registry of any trace of za, but that should be irrelevant since it was happening after a format and clean install of XP and there had never been any firewall of the system before.