as far as the different ports #'s for the different users i have done that, however the whole thing with the first user account, there is no problem what so ever with me using mcafee & windows firewall together, and it shows the brick wall in front of the earth, however i have full bars. but on the 2nd user account, i just can't connect. and i have all port info different for now, but i did have it all the same, and that did not work, so i changed it to 65000, and then added that to be accepted by mcafee & windows, but still nothing. i did the patch on user account 1, and that worked, however if i were to do the patch for user 2, i would actually be changing it back. so that won't work. any other suggestions would be great. oh, and i am not using a router, i have a high-speed connection with satelite.