Windows XP SP3 TCP/IP Patch To Increase Maximum Half Open Connection Limit

I just tried it and I totally saw a huge change in my speed!

Don't use a "patch" for something like this, it's asking for trouble!
Go to, & open, your Networking screen, get to your Settings screen...
...and set your incoming & outgoing TCP/IP Max "allowed" connections from there...
(I'm on a 64-bit Vista machine, so I can't do it in front of me to tell you step-by-step, & my XP-SP3 box is sleeping right now);
That way, you're able to put back what you changed if need be, and you ONLY changed ONE thing at a time;
...(You DID only change that ONE thing at a time, RIGHT?!?)...
Using something to "patch" something that's a user-adjustable "setting" is just begging for all of the malware-writers out there to do a lot more than "open up your spigots settings" without you knowing about it, (and you wouldn't like some of the stuff I've seen them do "behind you back"!)...
There's also the "other" settings screen you can look at (and maybe change, but always make a backup or at least set a "Restore-point" first!), and that's using the "Control Panel-Devices-", (or whatever your machine calls it), and open your NIC (Network Interface Card) settings, found under "Networking" or "Adaptors-Networking" or whatever, then pick the one you are using to access the 'Net for your P2P connections;
Like for me, right now, I'm on my LAN's WiFi, so I'd open my "Device Manager-Connections-Wireless Adaptor", where the machine will tell me it's working OK & my WiFi unit is Enabled, then I'd open it further & look at the settings for the card or unit, and that's where I can set my max. Incoming & Outgoing Packet limit, and everything else;
(If your on your Ethernet adaptor, where this'll do you some GOOD, {or any other networking adaptor that has the following setting available), do NOT try to 'set' any 'Network Address' - This will really mess you up! leave that one alone, or you'll be glad you set that Restore Point!),
...and on my personal Ethernet Adaptor setting, since I like to know which machine's accessing the router and when, and since my DSL only goes to 7-Mbps, I set the card from "Speed Negotiation"-"Auto" to "10Mbps Full Duplex", which will cause the card to "talk" to the router at it's lowest apeed, and that makes my router light turn Amber instead of Green, so I can see it from across the room, and I know which machine's accessing the router at that moment...
...since the other machine that's connected is set for "Auto", which will run at 100-Mbps, and my router will give it a "Green" light instead of "Amber", even though my Internet connection can't go anywhere near that fast, the router will connect as fast as it can, just in case my LAN DOES run faster, (but I'm 'patient' enough for a 7-Mbps setting on my laptop)...
The idea I'm trying to pass along, is that anything a "patch" like this can do, it can do and a lot more, without you knowing what it DID, and that's "Bad Stuff",
...while if you "Set it yourself", you know what you did, AND you can try different settings until you find the one that's best for YOUR particular machine!
(I've never seen a "One setting works best" for ANY type of thing that's a varied as much as PCs can be!);
If you read the article that tells you what this "patch" is 'supposed' to be DOING, then you'll SEE, when you get to those "Settings" screens, exactly what it's supposed to change, and that you can change it yourself,
but letting a "patch" change something THAT simple makes ME personally suspicious as heck...
It's no wonder that there were so many diferent people yelling "Virus!" when they tried it, although I didn't try it myself, because my machines have already been "optimized" for my set-up, and because I KNOW better!
If you are a "Tech Novice", (and that's a wonderful thing to BE in many cases, believe it or not), then ask someone you know who has knowledge about it BEFORE you make any changes, or read up on it on Microsoft's Knowledge Base site, or, or...
You get the idea: "Research it 1st, and you won't be sorry later"...
...And to the person who said "You start the machine and it opens 8...(connections)? Sounds like there's something major wrong..."
No, there isn't, and here's why, so let's count them off:
You need ONE to "talk " to the SCREEN,
you need ANOTHER for the KEYBOARD,
you need at least TWO for a single Networking adaptor; (if you have a NIC + a modem, it'll want at least 4 to 40),
Speakers? that's another one or two (you DO like stereo, right?),
...and so on....
I'm amazed they only had 8 on startup! Oh, I forgot the Hard Drive, any CD/DVD drives, any Floppy, the USB ports, a Printer Port (that's two, it's bi-directional at the very least), if you've got any Serial Ports, that's another two each minimum, + any FireWire ports, HDMI port, and a plethora of other ports & things hat start up which most of us don't even NEED, like when I got my Vista 64-bit machine, it starts up the Services for a Tablet PC, (and this is NOT a "Tablet" machine at all), which wastes a LOT of my machine's resources right of the bat & never gets used!...
You see, each & every thing that the machine's "basic brain bus" has to "talk to" needs at least one or two channels for EACH thing it's going to send or get info to & from, so after you've "been under the hood" of computers for awhile, you start getting like me - amazed that anything higher than an old 4.77-MHz XT-Class machine could start & run with only 8 'channels' open!
And you can blame that one squarely on Microsoft, since it's the Operating Platform (pre-Win-2000, Windows was NOT an Operating SYSTEM, it had to boot DOS first, & it ran "on top", while with Win2000 & later, it became a "real" Operating SYSTEM), although considering that my (very) old machines used only 10k to 16k for the entire OS & worked just fine, I'll never know why Windows needs multi-megabytes just to RUN, and if your hard drive is anything less than a couple of Gigabytes, it's too small for anything useful, but I digress -
Anything to do with setting your ports to help P2P speeds will be machine-specific, so you'll need to try several sets of settings before you find what works best for you, but personally, I'd NEVER trust a "patch", (read: "Script"), to mess with something so low-level as my TCP/IP settings, without my knowing what's going on, or at least, having it print (or save to a text-file) what the settings WERE, & what it changed them TO.
Good luck!

Actually, 8 is a VERY LOW number of "TCP" connections for ANY Windows-based machine (or even DOS) to make upon startup, and here's WHY:
Sometimes a connection is routed through the TCP/IP stack just because it's easier to do for the programmer who wrote the old, initial OS at the time;
Other times, it only "looks" like they're going through the TCP/IP ports, and sometimes they really ARE, but it's to IP "127.0.0.1", which is the machine's own "loopback" port address, so they're really "internal connections";
Now, let's see just how many of these "internal connections" a machine needs to have, in order to get some very basic operating abilities, ok?
First, you need a "Write-only" port to the Screen, so you can see what it's doing...
SO, we've just used 1 "connection" so we can se what we're doing (or what the machine's doing, whatever);
Now, we need to be able to "talk" to the thing, so we open another connection, this one is a "Read" connection to the Keyboard;
That's TWO; If we've got ANY kind of sound (other than the old XT-class "beep"), we'll need another one or two (some systems mux one "connection" & get stereo, others will "eat" two connections, one for each channel; Now, if you've worked with the "modern-day" fancy sound systems, you'll know that if you've got "real" Stereo, you've got everything you need to decode all channels of sound up through the 5.1 (or "7.1"), so those don't add anything, so that's another one or two;
...And we need to have something to have the Operating System ON, which gets read into mamory ('cause RAM is faster than anything else in the hardware, at least for now), so we've got either a Floppy (antique) or a HDD, so that's another couple of "connections", & until SATA, the typical ESDI-506 HDD needed two cables: 1 for Control (two connections, commands & responses), and 1 for Data (at least one connection, but usually two, even though data only went one direction at a time, so if you really wanted to, you COULD write an OS that used ONE "connection" for the Data part of the HDD connections);
...With Serial ATA (SATA), we still have Cmmand/Response & Data-In/Data-Out, but we just have much faster CPUs, so we can either write our OS to use lots of machine cycles switching between "Read/Write" & "Cmd/Resp.", or we can eat another pair per function, two for Command/Response & another pair for Read Data/Write Data; I honestly don't know how it's done anymore, but we know that there are at LEAST two connections to the "non-volatile data storage system", sowe have to add in at least those two;
...(Or however many are REALLY used nowadays; You can tell I'm getting a little "Long in the tooth", but I still remember the "original" microprocessor, the 4004 from Intel, a 4-bit chip, & I've still got a portable "Ham" radio that uses two of them - one to make the LCD display work, and the other to run the PLL that tells the radio the frequency I want it to stay on, & when to change that for the "offset" - If any of that last is confusing, read "The Radio Amateur's Handbook" or Google W1AW, 'cause I'm not going to eat up more space here trying to make a ham operator out of you, no offense intended)...
And then there's the modem, (most machines have one, even if you never USE it, and that's at LEAST two to several dozen, depends on the chipset it uses)...
...OK, you say you didn't put IN a Modem card?, Great! You'll have a NIC instead, so you can connect to an Ethernet cable & get your broadband DSL or whatever, & you'll maybe have a WiFi card too, and each of THOSE take up almost as many "connections" as you can spare, depending on just how big the internal buffers are on the cards, {or in the chipsets}, and you'll really eat them fast, especially if you're using a laptop, or are running a big "desktop-replacement laptop", (the WiFi needs several for the data going in each direction, and then there's the NIC for the Ethernet, or the Modem, or both, or all 3, and each of those uses "connections" that are "kind of dedicated"), {Thank goodness for "IRQ-sharing"!}...
...And if you plug your laptop into a "port expander", that >may< take up from one to a zillion "connections per port" that it "expands",
...(Unless you've got a really nice hardware budget, and you got a Port Expander that takes care of its own "connection-multiplying" with a mux chip inside it, so it only needs a few to a dozen or so connections, depending on how many things it DOES, or lets YOU do)...
So far, we're up to quite a few, and if you leave out the ones for the laptop stuff & anything other than Screen, Keyboard, HDD, floppy or one USB, & a Printer (USB or older Centronix, which are both going to be two-way connections each anyway), that's only to boot into DOS, and you can leave out the Sound and STILL easily come up with 8;
(And with the sound, that's at LEAST one & more likely two more, but often a "sound card" will use more than that, since the "game controller" lives on that card, if they still put those things in; I notice my newest machine's got a million USB ports);
If your machine has a "game controller port" on it, that's at least two more, usally several more for different axes of a joystick or whatever...
...but I know I use at least two, since I use my "game controller" port for my MIDI-In & MIDI-Out cable, (which is a nice, sedentary, one-way 31.5-kHz per plug or socket connection, but it needs to "feed through", so that's two, I can't "get away" with just one & "strobe" it, the music wouldn't sound so good!)...
I'll spare you the details of all the other places & things (Mouse, any serial ports, Printer/USB's/etc.), and just point out that if you're running anything much more than "bare-bones Free-Dos", you're going to have to have quite a few "connections" open, just so the machine can start up & run enough to put the little "C:>_" on the screen...
Now, lets say that you're like a zillion other people, (I'm not trying to make any judgements or to discredit anyone here, {I'm one of these people myself, much as I hate to admit it}, and I'm just using numbers from the "Trade Papers" & the Gov't, & the Gov't doesn't lie to us, now DO they?)...
...and we'll figure that you're running some version of "Windows";
...Wow, do YOU have a LOT of things running that you probably don't even KNOW about!
...(I was sure surprised to see just how much stuff is going on "behind MY back" on this newfangled machine I've got!)...
When I got this machine I'm typing on right now, with 64-bit Vista Home Premium "pre-installed" on it, I found the entire host of "services", (that's 'computer-speak' for "little program-lets that let the machine take care of something it needs to, so it can work"), which are ALL for a "Tablet"-PC, (and I didn't BUY a Tablet PC, it's NOT a Tablet PC, and I'm STILL finding "services" that run at startup & that I'm STILL removing to give me more room on the HDD & to speed things up, since there's NO reason TO run all of those Services for the Tablet PC when it isn't a Tablet machine, so there's NO Touch-Screen or Light-Pen, etc., etc.)...
See how fast we got up to well over 80, which is over 10 times the 8 you say is "way bad"?
I agree that it's "Way Bad", by all means, but that's where things go a lot of the time, and it's because coding in Assembler has gone the way of the 6502 MPU, and the ONLY way to write truly tight, efficient code is to do it in the machine's native language, which is actually "1's & 0's", but I'll give Steve Gibson a break & let his calling Assembler "the machine's native language" slide this time, since it DOES get "translated" down to the "1011001100010100" that a 16-bit CPU would understand to either mean something for it to DO, use for an address, or see as something that's not in it's table of Instruction Codes & refuse to run it...
...(In the old days, if a programmer told a 6502 to do something that it wasn't made to do, either it's "lock up", usually putting pretty patterns on the screen, or it may actually DO something, which were called "Undocumented Features" if ALL of the chips did it; If only SOME did it, it was a "fluke" & we didn't use it 'cause it wasn't reliable enough)...
...And we've been using 32-bit machines, (mostly, anyway), for many years now, so the 16-bit example is "good enough" to illustrate why just about no one, (except Steve Gibson, bless him!), writes in "Machine Language" anymore...

...I shudder to think of keeping track of all of those 1's & 0's in just a single 64-bit instruction or address!
That's why there are 32-bit (most common), and (newer) 64-bit CPUs out there now, and with the Dual-"core" through "Quad"-"core", & up thru 8-"core" CPUs, it's no wonder that there's no longer any external Floating Point Co-Processor, {which was called the "Math Co-Proc.", "back in the day" of the 80286/386, and I THINK 80486};
The "Pentium" was "named" instead of "numbered" because, for one of many reasons I'm sure, Intel got tired of the "clone"-makers using their chip-numbers, (which can't really be copyrighted), and went to a name, (after the "486", the next would've been "586" and "5"="Penta", hence the "Pentium", a name, (which CAN be copyrighted, and was!).
...So, now you see that it's Microsoft that's opening up all of those "connections", so you might as well blame them...
I know the rest of us usually do! They're used to it by now! :)