Our buddies in other forums have helped us out with the problem!
Get yourself a free copy of Zone Alarm at:http://www.zonelabs.com/
After downloading and setting this gem up, go to:
http://www.grc.com/
Zone Alarm is one of the most comprehensive security tools around and makes your computer almost impervious to prying eyes.
The "grc" site is great for testing the security of your computer. Once you are at the site, select the "Shields Up" icon. Wait a moment for the page to load. Once it has, scroll down to two buttons labeled:
Test My Shields Probe My Ports
Selecting each utility and letting them run until they have completed their task will be quite an enlightening experience. The program tries to get into the guts of your system from every way that it can. A report is generated after each task is complete. So far, the Zone Alarm software makes this computer invisible, yet I have full access to everything on the internet. Its probably only good until someone writes a program to get around that, but then...it keeps people in business. Hope it helps! Safe computing!