Satya's blog - Netstat explained

All those ports are actually listening on 0.0.0.0 but the hosts file maps www.doubleclick.net (and others) to 0.0.0.0 and the OS happily looks up the hostname. Grr.

And XP happily hides the hosts file deep inside windows\system32\drivers\etc.

I still want to know why XP is listening on all these ports.