I kept thinking about what " patnb2002" said about being afraid of his hard drive being exposed.

So I decided to go into my firewall event log and compare the hits its getting now that I have been using WinMX instead of Limewire.

As I said earlier, in Limewire, I was getting some nasties that were being caught by McAfee, even after bypassing or working around my linksys routher hardware firewall. I also said maybe that was due to the fact that we "are" file sharing. I know little about ports and so forth..

I was WRONG. From the moment I Uninstalled limewire up to now... ( which includes installing winMX and using it to both upload and download many songs successfully) I have received NO MORE HITS THAT BYPASSED MY HARDWARE FIREWALL.

In other words, something in limewire was able to bypass my router hardware firewall and try to get in. Without the second firewall McAfee- they would have succeeded.

Using WinMX ( I have not tried any others....and I don't promote Win MX ... I don't even like it that much because you can't search by Genre) but Using WinMX.... There were zero such attempts.

Now maybe what limewire was doing was a result of "the pushing" thing that limewire does. or maybe not.

I am not taking any chances. No more limewire... I may check em out again in a year or so.... see if they have become more secure...because I did like the concept but not at the expense of my security.

silky