WinXP firewall preformance

Hey,

Wondering if im the only person that has experinced this,
but I just turned off my winXP firewall and found a big preformance jump in P2P ( im not endorsing it). not only that but it seems I get a lot more thoughput than ive ever seen ( its not another source either).
What is the deal with winXP firewall ?
it seems completly inefficient!
wasnt intergrated into the TCP/IP stack properly or something?
pitty XP didnt come with IPTables!

I don't like the ICF much either.. I think they slapped it on as too much of an afterthought, they do seem to be making it more powerful with XP SP2, but I wont believe till I see...

Another thing that I find disturbing about the firewall, if you click on the 'settings' tab you'll see the list of protocols it allows etc. now sometimes if you've installed different apps you'll see they've added their ports there (for example MSN seems to do this).. this means theres a Windows API that lets you add ports to allow... isn't this a bit random ? If I write a trojan, I can make use of the wonderful windows API to just allow my ports..

I haven't played with XP's built-in firewall yet, but I have been keeping an eye on XP SP2. And in SP2 the firewall is turned ON by default. I wonder if this means the network performance of XP under SP2 is going to be degraded unless you turn the firewall off? Or will Mr Gates have fixed it's shortcomings? The other thing to watch with this is that as well as being turned on by default, the thing will come with a default configuration. This might well be fine for basic setups but in other cases it might not. So if you install SP2 and things stop working, the firewall you never asked for might be blocking your traffic!

All I ask is that they disallow all incoming traffic on public interfaces.. at the very least !! The problem will crop up when their firewall starts asking you 'do you want to allow this program to access the net'.. then everyone will turn it off .

Furthermore.. they actually have a sweet little API to allow you to open a port.. I wanna be the first person to write a backdoor that opens a port using Microsofts own API