Cojo,
I am now using ZA for my firewall--with XP firewall
I believe that most people will say that running two or more firewalls together might cause problems or just be counterproductive (using more resources). XP firewall is very basic and does not block anything outgoing. :'(
Zone Alarm free does a good job. Zone Alarm Pro does a great job. I was using Zone Alarm free until I heard about eTrust EZ Armor Security Suite. Computer Associates are offering the eTrust EZ Armor Security Suite
http://www.my-etrust.com/microsoft/index.cfm? for FREE for 1 year to Microsoft users. I decided to give it a try since it is free for a year. The firewall appears to be Zone Alarm Pro 3.7.211 but is called EZ Firewall.
The installation for EZ Armor allows you to install both or either the Firewall or Virus Checker. They are separate applications. Since EZ Firewall is the same as Zone Alarm Pro, you'll get to use it for free for one year. Then you can use your favorite Anti Virus such as Avast along with it. I tried quite a few of the sites for port scans, etc. with all perfect results with few modifications to the firewall.
If you want to get your feet wet using Registry tools, try RegCleaner. It is very simple and has some nice added features.
You can find it here: www.jv16.org
jv16.org has gone commercial and charge now for their software. They also discontinued their forum after the software developer linked up with a company who decided not to allow the public any access to previous free versions. After the beta testing (each release lasted only a month or two), the company decided to charge $29.95 without ever mentioning that they would discontinue the freeware version. They even changed the links of every website that had the free version to the new shareware version within a matter of days. See
http://www.outpostfirewall.com/forum/showthread.php?s=35566a572d10f2ff31358d54b342b27a&threadid=7918&highlight=jv16 for what others say about this.
Easy Clean works well and can be found at
http://www.toniarts.com/ecleane.htm or a beta verion at
http://www.toniarts.com/betas.htm.
BTW - The people at this forum are really helpful and do their best at helping all. Vlk just released an updated Avast driver for a possible fix for the system resource problem some were having with Avast (I was one of them who started the post at
http://www.avast.com/forum/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=1477;start=0). My computer would start crashing after 4 to 8 hours with this problem that no one could solve at first. Well, with the replies from people like Technical, Dave50, Taikonaut and others and the hard work of Vlk, it appears that the problem has been solved. I am now going on
16 hours with no signs of crashing or slowing down. Hallelujah! It's great to be able to use Avast again.
So I guess what I am saying is that this Avast community is one of the
BEST around.