The difference between windows 2000 and windows 95/98 in regards to netbios is you actually have the capability in the underlying OS (assuming you used NTFS to format the partition) to assign user rights/permissions to various directories and the ability to tweak exactly what is shown/available through netbios commands, where windows95/98 without a firewall has no capability to block netbios stuff other than to not use it at all (unbind it from your interface, don't enable sharing).

Editing your lmhosts file is not much different that editing an /etc/hosts file, it just provides name resolution for netbios without having to query the computer or a wins server for its name. I highly recommend moving to either windows 2000 or windows XP depending on what you are going to use your computer for, it has the capability to be much more secure (you still have to know how to do it). I wrote a starter tut on hardening windows 2000, using this would protect you somewhat from netbios style attacks; however, I still highly highly recommend sitting behind either a firewall or a personal firewall.

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=234577

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