Are their good firewalls that you don't have to disable a lot to do what you want?

[geepondy]

Like many others I wasn't too happy with Norton IS, as it was a system hog. So last year I switched to Zone Alarm Pro in which I like the interface and it seems less of a system hog then Norton IS but I am getting tired of having to disable it to do what I want to do. Tonight I had to do so twice. The first was when running a Speakeasy Internet speed test as it wouldn't perform the download test and the second was when uploading photos to the Costco photo center. They appeared to try to upload but gave failure messages. When I disabled ZAP, they uploaded fine.

So now my ZAP subscription is up and I'm contemplating whether to renew or search for other alternatives. What do you guys think? Anybody try both Norton IS and ZAP but ultimately switched to something else?

[WSFuser]

ive used ZAP in the past but then switched firewalls severals times. im now settled with the free Comodo Pro. its a very powerful firewall with reasonable resource usage.

[farmerlee]

I have used them both in the past but don't anymore due to certain annoyances and problems.
If you have a firewalled router the simplest thing to do is just use that, or something like the windows firewall which is just set and forget.