I personally think that its just an issue of the firewall, i mean at the end we all know that ms firewall up to some extend sucks. so go with the other firewalls, (there are free ones)

or if u want enable the xp firewall but u'll have to either crash your game trying to click okay for the firewall prompt. or u'll have to manually add the exe file to firewall's list.

agreed.... disable the firewall and almost all of them will work fine.. Use some other firewall of course.

Holy Crap ... what will work?

Everything, if you turn off the stupid firewall and the "security" features, which is possible, just check out the new ref.chm that can be downloaded from M$'s website, here:

Windows XP Service Pack 2 Deployment Tools

I would like to add, that if you wait a while, (couple months maybe?,) everything on the blacklist, should have a patch for it, with the exception of programs that are already updated, such as the older versions of office. (Office 2k4 is now out and not on the list for example.)