Hi guys.
Im a returning user of avast4home.As i can see this av is working better than before and it is more stable now.Well done to those thech.engineers.
Regarding the firewall........at the moment im using sygate which i found far better than zone alarm.Zone alarm does not detect all outgoing connections.At the moment there are too much complaints about the new version of zone alarm.You can check this in Download.com ratings.
So i will recommend SYGATE,it works fine with avast!