Im not an Expert on Windows Firewall in Vista but i Think you should have some rules set before you even think about Going on a public WiFi Hotspot. i know on mine ive had no problems but im not sure how ive set it up ive jsut trialed and errored with it to be perfectly honest. Vista does make it easy though. have a look and you might figure it out

Hey, thanks for the reply. I wasn't on the computer in question when I made the post, so I was a little wrong in how I phrased things.

The option is block all incoming connections. Now, that sounds good to me, but like I said, it still shows up on a port scan, but I wasn't able to connect to any of the ports with telnet. I don't have any rules set, because I don't want anything coming in that I didn't ask for. I just rescanned it, and it still shows as being dead (not responding to a ping), but also lists open ports, there are about 5 shown as open, and that was just a scan of 1-1024.

Sunbelt and ZoneAlarm are good free firewalls.Comodo also has a good one but its hard to find without the anti-virus bundle.

I was playing TF2 a 1st person shooter and these 2 brothers had like 900 pings :O I always try to help people out so I asked what with the pings ??? They said their WIFI got jacked a lot.They installed Comodo "I couldn't remember the others" and were like wow dude thx so much ! They had 100-120 pings / latency after that.