portsentry opens ports/services?
 

after installing portsentry and using the default ports for tcp and udp it seems that all the ports listed in the portsentry.conf file opened up the respective services for each port, when I run nmap.

Does portsentry actualy start all those services/open ports, or is it simply just listening on them and therefore I don't actually need to see if some 50+ services are now running on my box?

There aren't actual services listening on all those ports, it's just portsentry listening for probe attempts. That's just how portsentry works. It's often a major reason why people claim they don't like using portsentry (myself included).

what do you use then in place of portsentry?