Chill guys.
Use a decent firewall and thats it. I used to use zone alarm but some IM spam still got through, so I changed to Sygate Personal Firewall 5 (free for personal use) and it's the dogs doodads.
Nothing can even look at your modem without permission :-)
It has backtrace facilities and other features you won't find in ZA.
I never had Win2K sp 3 attempting to connect to the internet by itself in the first place. I dunno what your settings are like but turn off automatic updates and other nonsense.
Disable a few services that auto start (set them to manual) and thats that. You can get info for each one individually. Plus disablinmg some of the unneeded crap that otherwise auto starts saves some ram too.
