Oh c'mon people. I know you all like Windows bashing, but this is silly.
Almost ALL of the Windows 2000/XP 'phone home' services can be disabled, if you are bothered to learn the OS a little bit. Pasting URLs to utilities that don't do anything extra other than save you a few mouse clicks, is counter productive and just fuels the FUD.
Any of the network packets still being released by Windows 2000/XP are just standard network management stuff, like IP allocation (netbios) browser identification, etc. Windows is a NETWORK Operating System, it's not supposed to sit on a LAN and be totally quiet. Because some of the packets are 'broadcast' packets by design, your router will just forward them blindly onto the internet, and in fact probably don't get any further than your ISPs routers as those will have more sophisticated packet filtering mechanisms.
So stop panicing. MS are not allowed by law (certainly in Europe, I can't speak for the US) to hold personal information on you without your express permission, and the waffle in the EULA doesn't actually grant that.
Anyhow... UDP Port 1027 is used for RPC (Remote Procdure Calls) and is fired up by several apps, one of which is Messenger. RPC is a necessary function of XP or 2000 in a network environment, and doesn't expose you to anything (providing you are patched, and behind a firewall).
If you really are that paranoid, just de-install all network and modem drivers. That will make you nice and secure, and I hope you enjoy your isolation. ;-)
-Jar.
(MCSA, MVP, 8 Years Professional Windows Exp. )
