said by 19579823:As long as you have a firewall and AV you should be fine!
Sorry, that isn't even close to enough. A firewall will protect you from a worm. AV software can only protect you from things it knows about. I highly recommend reading
Mark Russinovich's Zero Day. If the name
Mark Russinovish sounds familiar he was a cofounder of Wininternals Software, a little company that Microsoft purchased. It offers a wonderful example of how even doing everything right doesn't protect you from becoming infected.
Need to run as a limited user.
Do not use Flash
Do not use Java
XP itself isn't the problem, it is how it is used. We'll see in a little over a month how badly XP will be owned.