disables my microsoft firewall? I don't want to have an unsecure connection and have someone hack into my work computer...and since they've disabled my firewall, i'm not sure what do, the firewall is only active at work.

Make sure your home wireless network uses WPA encryption and for further security make sure it allows only the MAC addresses of machines you want to allow on your home network.

If you have a home internet router this will take the place of the windows firewall.

I do find it odd that your work set your firewall to be disabled away from work - check and make sure you don't have symantec's firewall installed. Regardless my previous paragraph should suffice. Software firewalls for the desktop came into being since home users rarely had firewalling routers at home.