i seem to be good for about ONE game before i have to reboot to gain playability back even with the ICS service DISABLED
And here's the evil I'm talking about...
Seems to be one of the first instances of MS's "We can protect you better than anyone else, and we'll prove it, over your dead connection" philoshophy...
From my experience, the "ICS firewall" is a semi-independant routine, not tied into the master ICS control. Therefore, even though ICS, and it's NAT / Port forwarding powers may be
disabled (via services window), the firewall's still chugging along doing it's own thing to protect you from the evil internet. To top it off, the only white paper I found on ICS and opening it up concerned some esoteric registry edits that were designed to open up the appropriate ports. When I followed those instructions
to the letter, attempting to open up the SFC ports on the machine hosting ICS, the over-protective firewall still blocked all SFC requests.
To my knowledge, the only way to stop the ICS firewall is to never have it even load into memory. To never have it load to RAM means you need to fully deactivate ICS (not disable,
deactivate), so that no ICS component even loads and reboot with it shut off (since ICS activated when you booted up to shut ICS off...)