Ping Plotter and network listening questions

i'm going to use Ping Plotter to analyse my network traffic. i'll read through this page before i start though.

i was just reading about listening to network traffic and i read you can inadvertently or unknowingly expose your system or network to harmful traffic or events when listening to traffic. would this apply to Ping Plotter?

thanks.

 

i also just read this whilst reading about a port listening software - NB i have XP with raw sockets disabled.

NOTE on Windows NT, 2000, and XP you will not by default be able to listen to ICMP traffic. Windows NT and Win2000 have security in place that inhibits the use of ICMP. The work around for NT is to disable the security check on RAW sockets by creating the following registry variable and settings its value to DWORD 1: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Afd\Parameters\DisableRawSecurity

i think ICMP is the thing i'm most interested in, as i think i might have a small network problem. does the above apply to ping plotter. sorry if this is explained in the ping plotter tutorial. i wanted to ask while i remembered to; and i want to get a move on as i only have the trial version at the moment which will run out soon.

thanks

EDIT
i just checked, and i dont have the key with that DWORD value

EDIT#2 sorry, i just ran PingPlotter for the first time and i see it's able to use a different .dll so what i asked in this thread is void.