Well I have found a few disturbing things with SP2 so far.

First I read two disturbing things:

* it has been disabled so you can't send TCP packets in a raw socket ( I haven't tested this yet however ). We have a few applications that actually depend on this, and there seems to be now way of turning it off yet.

* you can't send UDP packets with a source that is not your own. Again we have a few applications that depend on this(Haven't tried this one either yet, only on the loopback adapater, and there it still works).

I am sure there must be ways to enable the original behaviour somehow, just haven't found it yet. At the moment this isn't a big concern since the target platform for the applications are Win 2000 at the moment(and will never be XP, but what if the same behaviour is forced onto Win 2003?), however our dev environment for each developer run on XP, which means we cannot move to SP2 or we have to move to a more expensive Server license or move down to 2000 ;(

Second, if you have 2 NIC cards on the same IP net, and you try to reach them from another machine with the windows firewall on, only one adapter will respond. If you turn off the firewall both will work normally again. Even orginating packets with a bound socket will be blocked in the firewall, I presume because of the next annoyance, the network card used does not have the IP of the source field IP address.

Third, if you bind a socket to a specific IP address, that IP address will indeed be the source address, however it "might" not use the network adapater on which this IP address is present in a machine with two NIC cards on the same IP net.

Fourth, the firewall settings are confusing a bit, you have the exception list, and the advanced settings, but the exceptions you enable won't show up automatically in the advanced part (the old part if you wish) of the firewall.

Also a small graphical annoyance is the fact that the tray bar icon for a wireless network adapater has changed from a "two" computer one to a single one, so now you can't easily see if packets are coming on to your computer or going out of it.

These are just the things I have found so far, but it is bugging me a bit that after 15 minutes of running I already found these.

Another little oversite: SP2 breaks my Netgear WiFi software (gets stuck in endless scanning loop, with or without Windows Firewall enabled). I have to "Use Windows to configure..." setting to have internet access.

What sucks about that is that Windows doesn't have the option to generate WEP keys from a password (like Linksys and Netgear do), so I have to manually enter it in.

*Sigh*

I have the placeholders :)

I believe we will have to revert back to pre SP2 until there is a solution for the raw sockets, or until we have had sufficient time to move to a third party stack.

I think it is a good thing to disable the functionality for most, but there should indeed be a way to either enable it back again or download a special update from MS to reenable the support.

Or the functionality could have been limited only on the Home edition and not the professional edition, as there are actually more legimit reasons than damaging reasons to use raw sockets.