Filseclab is very good and light, the interface takes getting used to but it gives lots of control, NetVeda is another firewall you can look into. Jetico is the best, far better sandboxing than Tiny at half the resource consumption, earlier versions had the un-install problems especially if it was uninstalled while still running in the background, they have addressed the problem since and now it uninstalls flawlessly. You can give the latest edition a try, of all the firewalls out there, this one features the best Stateful Inspection with myriads of choices.
I too was a long time Sygate user, however since I discovered the loopback issue, I decided to take it off as Avast is too precious for me to loose.
