I was at the MS Security Summit last week in NYC, and they were handing out CDs for XP SP2 RC1. The speaker said this will be the release candidate that shows up in June. It weighs in at 276megs. I applied it to XP pro and man o man ;) Essentially all network connections get firewalled. MS has decided to take the policy of locking down everything and then making the user "prove" that they they need programs or ports open. Looks like just about everything is locked down in xpSP2. All my apps seem to run fine with it, I may hve been asked once or twice if program XYZ can have access to such and such a port, but other than that, things look good. The built in popup stopper helps too. *Put this in a test environment first* My results may not be the same on your network/equipment/software you can get it as a download via http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/winxpsp2.mspx I wish I lived in Theory. Everything works in Theory.

Hi Vicshere Thanks for the info. I was tempted to try it out but changed my mind after heeding the following warning: This technical preview is unsupported and is intended for testing purposes only. Do not use in production environments. The purpose of the SP2 is to aid IT professionals in planning and testing for the deployment of Windows XP SP2. G-Day

"Essentially all network connections get firewalled. MS has decided to take the policy of locking down everything and then making the user "prove" that they they need programs or ports open." That sounds like a good thing to me! If i had my choice, i'd tell Microsoft to go one step farther and integrate Automatic Updating into the system in such a way that you couldn't turn the darn thing off if you wanted to. It's not just a matter of protecting your own system anymore. We all share one big network together, and when one person gets lazy, someone else gets clobbered.

Hi all I have SP2 in beta running on my test rig and its been there for about a week or so. I agree MS have domn some real good work with SP2. I think few people are going to get a rude shock when the final cut is roled out. There are some usefull features, like being warned that your anty virus is or may be out of date. Wel done MS I am most impressed. I also have had no issues with sp2 at all. A smal hickup after install but the updates took care of that. Looking forward to the final cut. Regards

So when is 2000 SP5 Gonna Incorporate these features into Windows 2000? Yep... Production environments still love the flexability of 2000 pro and can run it on older hardware keeping IT Costs Controlled. So when do we get the firewall with remote configuration scripts and such..... Firewall on each machine kinda scares me as an admin... how do I manage all the individual firewalls.......