Imagine coming across someone who had both an antivirus package and firewall software installed on their PC and yet both were switched off. You'd think that they were pretty dumb, way too brave or a little bit crazy (or they are antivirus researchers!). But the fact is that there are literally millions of Windows XP SP2 users who have a defense mechanism in place that would protect them against many of the vulnerabilities that threaten them, but that protection is, by default, partly disabled.

[It's] called Data Execution Prevention. DEP is a feature that is built into Windows (you must have SP2 installed to take advantage of this) that prevents an application or service from executing any code that resides in a non-executable memory region.

FULL ARTICLE

Thanks for the info.
My computer "doesn't support hardware based..." so I followed the 2nd series of steps but the "continue" box that the article said would come up for one of the steps didn't come up. Anyone know what I should do to get this set for more protection?

I don't think you read it correctly - the 2nd series of steps is for Vista. If you get the "doesn't support...."message, it just means that your processor cannot do the job so you have to rely on the in-built Windows SP2 bit of software protection to do it, which isn't as effective but is a better than having nothing.

"I know that I'm mad, I've always been mad"

Thanks for the clarification. I thought it was for Vista OR if you got that message.