I am sick of spammers and those stupid programs that find your open ports to launch ad ware on my machine. Well Norton does a pretty good job at finding some of these people, which makes me want to retaliate with spam of my own. So any help.

And can anyone tell me which ports I can close on my firewall that doesn't make surfing the net a pain in the butt. I seen something like 8 or 9 ports that are "commonly" used by webpages, but which ones could I close to stop these ad ware attacks. I have so much junk on my little laptop pretty soon I wont be able to do anything on but stop spam and ad ware on it.

I wish it was that easy. If it was, SPAM wouldn't be such a large problem.

The best thing you can do is run a firewall, keep Windows up to date, and not use your email address on ANY websites. Sign up for a hotmail address for that purpose.

Noone is putting adware on your computer through open firewall ports. You get adware by visiting the wrong sites, clicking the wrong links, running the wrong programs and using the Wrong Browser.

99.99% of all webpages use only outbound TCP port 80. You also need to allow name resolution traffic.

You should close all inbound ports on your firewall, surfing the web will still be quite tolerable. Allowing some specific inbound traffic makes things quite comfy. As for outbound ports, software firewalls tell you if an app is trying to connect. If you don't like it, deny the access.

As for retaliating, keep in mind that some forms of attack allow complete spoofing of source address, plus there are things like dynamic IPs - you may end up attacking an innocent person, perhaps a person who would bring a lawsuit against you.