Raptor:
Stealthed, to me, means that the default behavior of a computer port has been disabled so that it will no longer seek connections, and for all practical purposes, the port becomes invisible to hackers scanning for open ports.
My question was: why does the port suddenly lose its stealth status? This has happened on 4 free firewalls I've tried. It's funny that this never happened when I was paying for Norton Firewall. I'm beginning to think the online port scans are designed to show "unstealthed" ports in order to generate interest in Pro versions.
I'm going to install the free eTrust EZ Armor Security Suite (antivirus and firewall) because it's the only free firewall I haven't already tried, and if the online port scans report my stealthed ports as "unstealthed," I'm simply going to forget it and go on about my business.
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Merlin:
You're right about the Winder$ operating system. They've been working on it for close to 15 years; it
should have been perfect 5 years ago. Political alignments, profit worship, bullyism, etc have made it a trip to remember, that's for sure.