Excellent, I will try all of this either later tonight or tomorrow night. I was sitting there watching the list generated by tcpview changing second by second and realizing that my computer is more active than I realized. Thanks for tracking the progress here. I will post when I have more info.
if you have been surfing the web then you will see ports opening closing and in listening states. Close all of your browsers and the open ports related to browsing will eventually time out and close. Can take you to five minutes or more. At that point you should only see a very minimual number of ports open and most of those should only be open on the local side. Additionally once your idle for a while you shouldn't be seeing ports opening and closing unless you got spyware or some app running in the background that might or might not be phoning home. Antivirus programs, etc. Good luck Bsulli