Oh, brother.; disinformation and troll alert.
If you're going to run an MS product like XP, and if you care about the privacy and integrity of the data on that machine, and you don't want to automatically be a spam server, you'd better get SP2 and all updates up to about July 14 at least.
First, WinXP isn't really complete without SP2.
Second, no-SP raw XP is so rootable that Sasser (for example) can appear in your machine within seconds of being connected to the Internet.

I encourage use of software and hardware firewalls, if frequently updated AND regularly tested. Both have advantages and disadvantages. A SWFW is portable - important for laptops and lanparty gamez machines. But a HWFW is "set and forget", can protect servers from DOS, and can't be as easily turned off by a trivial vuln poke (as Norton's could be).