Hi Shante

You have asked some interesting questions, I won't be able to answer all of them but I can deal with a couple. You asked: OK, just imagine that you have a wall protecting your home from a busy high road (wall = firewall, busy high road = internet). Now, to get to and from that road, in order to get to work etc, you have to go through a door, i.e. opening a port (or several ports) on your computer to get to the internet. So basically, that is what you do when you allow LW access to and from the internet, you open a number of doors to and from your computer.

Therefore, when ever you run LW, or any other internet enabled app, you are giving that app access to and from the internet via your firewall. Those access ports will stay open until the application is closed, i.e. ended, or until you use your firewall to prevent further access.

Going off topic for a moment, must people don't know this but whenever you boot up windows a lot of its mini-apps (parts that make up windows) access the internet without your knowledge, the two that spring to mind are "svchost" and "Windows Explorer" (yes, Windows Explorer). Now, there is no reason why "Windows Explorer", and for that matter "svchost", should want to access the internet. Therefore, I have used my firewall to block them.

You also asked: Usually, you find that you can still surf the web, as normal, but you can no longer use your P2P app to download anything.

I found this out when I was with Virgin (a UK ISP) one Saturday I found I could no longer download film clips, when the week before I had no problems, while my internet browsing/surfing remained unaffected.

After doing some research, because Virgin would not admit anything was wrong, I came across an internet article that publicised that Virgin had started (secretly) bandwidth shaping.

That was last year, now Virgin has publically stated it will monitor it's customers usage and take appropriate action where necessary.

Hope this aided your understanding.


UK Bob