Make sure you have an antivirus, firewall, and preferably PeerGuardian on th PC you're gonna use. It's a sweet little program that has a list of IP ranges for various agencies (government, military, RIAA, etc.) and blocks them. It used to be really slow to load and a resource hog, but the newer version is very quick to load and takes up hardly anything. I've been using it for two or three years now, and have nothing but praise for it.
You can get it at
Methlabs