Help with Dual NIC/Net Firewall Setup

At wits end and seeking some guidance.

XPsp2 Host
Virtualbox running different OS guests. (Linux/Win98/etc..)

Trying to dedicate 1 NIC for XP and other for Virtual machines. I have them
both set up and working on different nets, but can't keep my firewall from
policing the Virtual machine NIC. I also was having problems with XP
accessing the VM NIC but I found a post on metrics and made the XP NIC #1,
and the VM NIC #999 and removed the gateway and DNS info from the VM NIC so I
think that part is fixed.

Not sure how much information is needed to for this problem but will be
happy to list anything or everything on request. Don't want to spam here with
a bunch of irrelevant info.

Akovia