Pseudo_newbie Question

Ok, having been reading several times daily here for a while now, I figured I would take the plunge and join up. Who knows, I might even have insight!
Right now I have a problem, and I figured this might be the most sensical place to post it.

I am not a completely new user as far as security goes, I have taken many of the precautions listed here, as well as a few I have found in my own travels, so more in the nature of a 'is something I have done making my computer TOO secure question?'

I run Win XP on a modern box with plenty of power both in a dual processor and ram (dual athalon 2400 and 512megs if it somehow matters) and run sygate personal firewall, norton antivirus, have spybot s&d and adaware installed, updated daily (or checked daily anyway) and ran probably on average of twice a week and run proport2.2. Somehow I am able to bring in packets from the internet (port 80 and mail ports (121?) but no incoming information, in the form of text-messages, files or what have you, are being allowed at the moment. I am really loathe to even attempt turning Sygate off to see if it is part of the problem.

Any ideas? Questions, commentary, complaints or what have you welcome.

P.S. I have searched the site for similar things, I may be a d`umas and missed something, but I *think* I was through about it.

A short answer is no you have not gone overboard with your precautions.

I run a router, Sygate, AVG, Spybot, Ad Aware, reg protect, all of which are updated constantly and scanned daily (AV atleast)

Have you configured your firewall to allow the applications? I run Sygate, and anytime I try to run an application thats web aware, Sygate gives a popup that says "hey this program "insert program" is trying to get here "insert ip" on port "insert port". All you need to do is click yes on that and it will add that in your applications list that are allowed.

If this doesn't work, you can manually add your application by clicking the applications button. Then you can select your program there. I'm assuming you may have already done this, but if not go ahead and try it and let me know.

Please ignore me, I just figured out what was wrong, someone who had port scanned me and attempted to spoof my IP/mac addie went onto my permanent ignore list, however since I rarely have use for and have not memorized my mac addie I did not notice its presence on said list.....hence the blocking.... :eek:
I feel very foolish, I should have known better.
Thank you to thadbme, it set me on the right track to fixing my rampant brain cell loss this evening. I'm not playing with security rules on Mondays anymore.