the security service itself, if you know how to use your computer safely, does nothing to help security. It is helpful for uneducated users who don't know what they are doing and tells them when they are doing potentially unsafe things. Aside from that security problem between the monitor and the chair, the security service itself does nothing.

Now, I also stopped the firewall, and that is one of those technical type security issues. However, I don't particularly care for pseudo, software firewalls though. I alrealdy have a linux box setup doing my NAT and firewalling, and I have my main server firewalled off some from the rest of the network, so my data is doubly safe. Software firewalls (by these I mean the norton/XP/etc. type that tell you what programs are using the net, not router-type software firewalls) are buggy, extremely annoying, and resource intensive. If i need to know what programs are accessing my network, i'll just do an nmap scan to see what's going on and if there are any ports in use that I didn't setup.

And SP2 has a number of vulnerability fixes that are important to patch (though it does create a number of other problems of itself. you know how all windows security patches require their own security patches. .