Security Center

The most talked about part of this service pack is of course the Security center and the much improved firewall. Anytime a new program tries to access the internet an alert message will pop up and ask you if you'd like to prevent this program from accessing the internet. Something I noticed is it doesn't stop the program at all! Behind this alert message my entire contact list was loaded in Trillian! This was before I gave it a selection to allow this program to run. As good as it is to have the capabilities of blocking programs from accessing the net it's rather stupid that they can access it until you say that the program cannot. Not only this, but I even told Windows FW to block this program and it STILL connected and I was able to send and receive messages just fine even while Windows FW was supposed to be blocking this! Microsoft really needs to redo this before the release is finalized. It's insane that this was allowed to happen this late in the development stage.

Here's a few screenshots of the Firewall configuration.
[1][2][3][4]

(Numbers 1,3 and 4 have changed slightly since RC1)

#1 is the basic on/off screen
#2 is the program exceptions list. You can manually add programs to your allowed or not allowed list. You can also modify what ports the various applications are allowed to use. From this screen is how you reach #3
#3 you can see the screen where you can block/unblock any port you want.
#4 used to be several tabs that they've combined and labeled advanced now. The network connections box is where you allow various services to access the internet such as IIS. The next box is the firewall log. If you ever mess anything up they now have a restore defaults button!