Its getting quite annoying transferring things to people on msn as its painfully slow. i have 750k broadband so things should be quick but whenever i transfer i get the 'slow transfer rate' message at the top of the conversation box.

If i turn the xp firewall off and close the conversation box down it works at a good speed but this is painfully annoying process of turning on and off the firewall.

If i forget to turn the firewall back on i then get a bloody virus even though i have an additional firewall too.

Any ideas on how to get fast transfers with the xp firewall still turned on?

Find out the ports that File Transfer uses and open them in the firewall. If you have SP2, you can do this under the "Exceptions" tab.

I believe the ports File Transfer uses are Ports 6891-6900, but im not 100% sure.

The XP firewall is UPnP-compatible, so you don't need to open the ports in it. Try opening them in your other firewall instead.

MSN has always had slow transfer compared to other IM programs like AIM. That's the only thing I dislike about MSN, I use AIM for nothing but file transfers.

The only other firewall i have is the kerio firewall, this makes no difference to the speed then i disable it. it seems only to be the xp firewall that does anything or affect the transfer rate. which is very peculiar.