AOL,McAfee,PE, etc.... some thoughts

Having seen the threads on this I thought I'd posts some thoughts, experiences, etc, that might be helpful to others.

I am very happy with AOL. I use 9.0 Broadband on a fast XP pro machine. However I am in the USA and can't speak to other parts of the world. Also I've been using AOL since back in the Win 3.1 days, and issues come and go. I jumped from Win95 to XP pro. Don't know as I'd care to try it on Win98. I heard of a lot problems with W98.

Let me say very loudly AOL DOES NOT HAVE A FIREWALL!!! They have partnered with McAfee to offer AOL Broadband folks a free version of Mcafee's Firewall Express. Jooske, I am not surprised no Mcafee users chimed in. I upgraded to the Firewall Plus, and I simply could not get it to work. Whats worse, is it was random. Sometimes it worked others times it didn't. Mcafee said it was AOL, and AOL was clueless. I gave up and went to Zone Alarm Pro 4.0 (4.5 now) and that has worked like a champ with AOL.

I just installed PE yesterday, and it all works great, but let me comment on the installation stuff. (Note, to the inexperienced. Most of what follows is learned by trial and error.)

I run, F-Prot,ZA,GoBack,SpyBotSD,TDS-3, Wormguard3,PG,Port Exp., and Abtrusion Protector. Each of the programs by themselves are for the most part very straight forward, and very user friendly. But when you mix them together, "stuff" happens. For example:

When I want to defrag the system files, which my defragger will do. I have to shutdown Abrusion Protector, and disable Goback. Goback is easy, but Abt Prot. has no shutdown mechanism, so those folks told me what 3 files to rename, so on reboot its off. Normally the Goback dismount, which occurs on reboot, takes about 30 seconds. Well, if you don't remove Wormguards protection, and uninstall TDS's execution protection, that 30 second process takes about 45 minutes. And so on and so on etc.

As a result of this when I do an uninstall/new install, the first thing I do is shutdown Wormguards protection, shutdown TDS execution protection, and PG. After the install I turn them back on. This seems to avoid problems.

Hopefully this gives some idea of things to think about.

Pete