After an enormous battle with my computer, I finally discovered that the SHIELD firewall I was employing was causing the problems. I then tried NORTON PERSONAL FIREWALL with similar results. So now I am using the firewall that comes with XP (which allows one to specify that web page requests be accepted) and my VISUAL STUDIO system works fine (except for the MSDN problem described in the previous post). However, the general opinion appears to be that the MICROSOFT firewall is inadequate, and should be replaced. Are there any fairly cheap firewalls (e.g. shareware ones) that are able to work with the IIS that comes with Windows XP?