Is there really something wrong with Zone Alarm?

Kerodo,

About Win2K, got to admit it is the best effort from MS by far, with SP4, it is also among the most mature of all the MS OS, that is its problem, from marketing sense, Win2K is a perceived threat for MS's bloat XP, I run Win2K SP4 in all the machines at home or office and have no problems whatsoever, as a matter of fact, this current Win2K installation is 3 years old and has gone through various program install/uninstall phase. I do have a good combination of reg cleaners though.

About support, as I said MS is taking your SP5 according to their announcement and will only release cumulative patches from time to time and then finally kill it like NT. Truly sad, I have no desire to put XP in my machine.

 

Diver - I had some problems with the LNS beta driver so I decided tonight to remove LNS and install CHX-I again. I don't care much about app control anyway. But what I might do is use that Winsonar anyhow, and at least I'll get notified if something does try to run or connect out, even if it can't stop it. That way I'll know something is going on, which is all I really care about anyway I guess... Without something there, you're never reallyt sure if anything is trying to run or get out, even though for me that event is probably rare or non-existent.

I'm going to work on my CHX-I rules tonight. Right now I'm allowing ALL outbound traffic, and doing force allows for needed inbound stuff that SPI doesn't take care of. What bothers me about tightening up outbound traffic and limiting it to certain ports and addresses is, if your browser for example needs to access remote port xxxxx (in addition to your usual programmed 80,81,443,8080,etc), then things might not work once in a while. It's cooler if your firewall pops up and tells you that the browser wants access to that port and lets you allow/deny it interactively. With CHX-I, you'd have to see that something wasn't working, then look at the logs, and then make a rule for it, which you may or may not ever need again. Aside from browsing though, I see no other problems.

 

Ok, snowbound, sorry about that...

 

Snowbound,

Definitely time for a new thread. Thanks for jumping in.