I've used sygate for years and just switched to za to play with it on my honey pot. I have a hardware firewall for the rest of the network. Nortons is good also but intrusive. Tiny firewall is soso and Kerio is very good. I dont love McAfee products but their firewall is supposed to be good. Panda is ok too.

Interesting personal firewall info here from GRC, my fav security site.

For the average user, these are fine. They are really not obsessed with in/out..
The best by far is to have a hardware one and not think about it.

Any "professional" that uses Norton products loses all my respect. When I was installing and maintaining networks I would refuse to work on any system that had any Norton product on it. They just caused too many problems. In most cases removing Norton fixed the problems anyway. It now seems to be impossible to remove Norton though.

Norton are still spamming, and it's only benefit seems to be in providing employment for local businesses that offer a virus removal service for home computer users.

Norton's is a pain in the ass, very true. Unfortunately people are afraid to try other things if they've used it for years and "love" it.
Refusing to work on a system that uses it, tho, is imho not exactly condusive to business if you are in the business of working on computers and networks. I'd never recommend it to begin with. I try to convince people to switch to something less intrusive, say panda or avp or something else, and give them reasons why. That usually works. But if they won't, well I'd never turn them down.
I have a system I use to test different things and I tested Nortons system works 2005, pos (piece of shit). 2004 firewall really blocks a lot of stuff but, like all the rest of nortons, is very intrusive and slows the pc down quite a bit.
Norton's has a tool to remove it but it never really does get all the nasty little bits it leaves behind. If it becomes a problem, I wipe out the pc and be done with it. That usually convinces people to change.

|mml|

In WinXP, you can set what's called a System Restore Point, which is a snapshot of your system, apps, registry etc. Then if anything screws up after installing new software, you can revert back to how it was before. It has saved my ass on several occassions. :)

I have to agree Jan...

Since I've had XP home and the sp2 patch in place and the quickheal full protection package, I'd have to say things are a-ok for me as well for quite sometime now.

The only time I ever have any real problem is if I have about 30-40 windows open and 10 billion applications running at the same time.

i let the xp auto-updates run. haven't had any issues yet (fingers crossed).

Holy crap!

After reading this whole post, I'm sure glad I'm on a Mac - LOL!!

Bill

I seem to have a talent for bringing posts to a screeching hault - lol!

Bill :D