I have just been floored by Windows XP

[JustAGuy]

Can you elaborate on the "anti-p2p socket hack"?  I've used various P2P utilities to move large amounts of data both before and after installing XP2, and I haven't noticed a lick of difference.

edit: DOS 6.22 was my favourite OS  :(
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The socket "fix" that Microsoft introduced was two-fold. First, they removed raw socket support (they removed the raw sockets API!). So, any program that used raw sockets, instead of Winsock or BSD sockets, gets borked. Second, Microsoft added a time-out feature to outgoing socket attempts. They introduced a queue that limits the number of outbound connections to something like 20 at a time. Any apps that do more than just 20 connections at a time are crippled or broken -- lots of bittorrent clients, for example.

Some conjecture: basically, Microsoft was trying to reduce or eliminate hackers and attacks on their systems. What they ended up doing was pretty heavy handed and had the byproduct of cutting bittorrent down at the knees, as well completely breaking apps such as the network security scanning program Nmap. Very quickly, some "hackers" came out with a fix to the affected DLLs, and most apps that were broken have been fixed by now.

They removed a whole API, and when people complained about that, their response was, "don't use those programs anymore."