Calling us jerks well, sorry if you feel that way about the forum. Don't forget as a Pro user you are able to get Pro Support. Just log into their Support page under Pro help. I won't provide links as you obviously don't like them.

Not sure why you have the firewall icon. I do know users of Charter have had a history of problems with that ISP. Just as an experiment, you could turn your XP firewall off momentarily (whilst LW is closed), re-open LW & see if you still have that brickwall icon. If no, then you probably need to go back & recheck your settings for LW in the XP firewall. If yes, then that leaves it up to being either your router or ISP. Netgear do have their UPnP on by default (yes they do still have NAT firewalls.) But perhaps the UPnP is not working reliably for some reason. (UPnP allows the program like LW to communicate directly with the router to open necessary ports whilst the program is open. LW supports UPnP.)

I won't dare suggest anything such as deleting prefs or checking your version of Java. Some people using Pro have had problems with the Java 1.6