I have noticed recently that several ports associated with Firefox remain open when the Firefox browser is closed. The number of open ports increases each time Firefox is opened and I have seen that the number of open ports has reached to more than 1,000 open ports at a time. The majority of the open ports are outbound TCP using port 443 and I also note a sustained increase in the network traffic after Firefox is closed. I have observed ports opened by the Explorer browser and noted that all of the ports opened with Explorer close when the Explorer browser is closed. The Firefox ports remain open when the browser is closed. Questions: - Should all open ports associated with an open Firefox browser close when the Firefox browser is closed? - Does Firefox have a setting that closes all open ports when the Firefox browser is closed? - Does XP have a setting that will close all open ports associated with Firefox when Firefox is closed? - Should I have security concerns about the accumulating open ports and increased network activity when using Firefox? Thanks.