I am definately getting “firewall on” messages and when I turn it off I get the warning balloon that is fixed and three times the size of the one I was getting

Any way to cut a long story short, I uninstalled Avast, reinstalled XP SP2 and reinstalled Avast again.

This has fixed the problem, however it has proved another problem that I have but will post that later on.

Thanks for the help it was much appreciated

Jorgo