Any advice on de-crudding WinXP?

I recently spotted a laptop cheap enough to talk myself into buying, with one tiny problem. It has XP Home on it, I'm not used to playing with XP under anything other than a regular user account. Can anyone point me at good advice for, A: Keeping it from getting turned into a spam/ddos/whatnot zombie the instant it's connected to the internet, B: running reasonably stable, and C: Maximizing battery life (already decided the LCD is usable at just under 50% brightness, and I'm planning on giving it fairly aggressive timings for going into sleep mode).

In other news, MS Works 2004 is officially evil. If anything I am thinking it's actually a little less friendly to work with than my old copy of Works 4.0 (or was it 3.0). Happily that is why I already grabbed the current version of Open Office.

This is encouraging me to look at setting up a wireless network again, which brings another question. Do any of the wireless cards/usb boxes for desktop machines have firewalls or anything more than WEP to help keep folks from getting onto your machines?

(Interesting, spellcheck recognized whatnot, but not USB)

To twisted not to share...

Most definately NWS! Don't yell at me if your companies IS department asks why you're pulling this site up. Tokyo Damage Report. A strange not-so-little site filled with "an American jerk"'s (his own description) thoughts and strange discoveries while living in Tokyo.