Some questions about Outpost

I have just recently installed Outpost Firewall Pro V3 and have some questions for the folks here. In the system tray, the icon for Outpost is a blue circle with a white question mark in it, is that the way its supposed to look? Has anybody heard of any conflicts between Outposts antispyware plugin and MSAS. I'm totally new to using Outpost but i've heard it mentioned a hell of a lot of times here and thought i'd give it a try. So any help at all would be great.

 

The icon has several different looks, depending on what "mode" you put Outpost in. The Blue ? means Outpost is in the "Rules Wizard" mode, which is the default. There is also a plugin that you can add that will display the icon as an incoming/outgoing graphical throughput monitor(similar to what Zonealarm shows).

As for conflicts, so far, I haven't seen any with what I'm running. I'm running Spy Sweeper along side Outpost 3 and I keep OP's realtime spyware protection on, without issue but I don't run MSAS's realtime protection.

 

Silly me... I have been using Outpost for a while now and was unaware of this plug in. As I hate the Blue question mark. Just me maybe but it resembles the symbol of a problem or cluelessness. Maybe it is trying to say something about its owner

Can you give this clueless owner more information on the plug in Thanks.

 

Here is a link to the plug in forum on the traffic LED http://www.outpostfirewall.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=66

 

Another question from me. How can i get Outpost to run automatically at startup, when i start i get the red shield saying my computer is at risk because Outpost is turned off. For the life of me i dont know how to sort this out everything else is running perfect with Outpost, any suggestions? Thanks

 

I assume you've taken the above advice and made sure that your policy is set to Rules Wizard. If not, do so (usually the red means the policy is set to block all traffic) If that doesn't do the trick two more things to check.

First, open up the Outpost interface by double clicking on the icon in the tray. Press F2 to bring up the options dialog.
It should open to the general tab and on it make sure the Normal box is checked.

If that doesn't work one more thing to check. Go to control panel, administrative tools, services. Outpost firewall service should be listed as a service. Make sure it is set to start automatically. If it's not, then right click on it, choose properties and you'll see in the dialog box that comes up a setting for start up type. If that's not set to automatic, use the drop down list to select automatic. If there's no Outpost firewall service listed or the service is already properly set to automatic, I can't really tell you what to do next other than reinstall the firewall.

To reinstall, first save your current configuration files by using the files menu, save as dialog. Make sure not to save your files to the Agnitum or Outpost folders because you're going to delete them. Next uninstall the application (I suggest you use the custom uninstallation option and select all files and entries--seems to do a better job than the automatic setting). After it uninstalls use Windows Explorer to make sure the Agnitum folder has been erased. If it hasn't erase it. Then you'll have to clean out some of the left over Outpost registry keys. There are two ways of doing this. First, get a registry cleaner, there are many both free and paid, and do a general clean up of the registry. Second, there is a tool for specifically cleaning up left over Outpost entries. You'll have to do a search of the Outpost User's forum mentioned below to find it. Then reinstall Outpost. Open the load configuration dialog by opening the Outpost interface and hitting Ctrl O. Find where you've saved your config files and select them to load and you've got your old config. back.

You also might want to consider posting on the excellent Outpost user's forum: http://www.outpostfirewall.com/forum/