Okay, decided to read some man pages before replying.
The file you want to edit to change open ports is /etc/inetd.conf. After you make changes you will need to restart inetd.
inetd is responsible for any incoming connections - basically it compares what is coming in against a list (inetd.conf) and decides what to do depending on the list, by default if the port is not on the list then it does nothing - ie blocks port. If it finds it on the list it runs the program associated with that port - on my machine it starts sshd when it recieves data on port 23, this means sshd doesn\'t need to be running all the time.
/etc/services is just a list of ports to services that run on that port so that programs can say ftp rather than 22 etc.
Hope this gets things going
Stu