Disturbing reading on The Register about the amount of time it takes for an unpatched Windows PC to be compromised simply by being connected to the internet - such as you might do when setting up a machine and attempting to run Windows update for the first
time.
So - can you patch it before it gets owned by the baddies? Well - you have four minutes. This is described as "odds that you wouldn't bet on in Vegas".
Having a home router/firewall combo with network address translation should solve the problem and you might expect corporate LANs to be safe places to plug a machine into - but you never know. Only takes one compromised laptop brought in from home or some
dingbat downloading and running something they shouldn't...
SANS have some
interesting Windows reading - including how to secure your Vista machine out of the box for novices. Sticking Linux on it maybe?
More from
The Register.