Trippie, I have a HTPC in my home network too. Because sometimes I go to friends's houses and we'd like to see a movie from my HTPC, I've set it up behind a Cisco router and forwarded only the relevant ports in Cisco's firewall (although nowadays any router has some sort of firewall built-in, making it appropriate for the job). Another security measure was playing with NTFS permissions and make all the movies read-only. There's no need to set up the HTPC in DMZ, because there are too many ports to close (about all of them, except the ones that VLC connects to). Hope this helps you a bit. nitroshift