For the past two or three years, I've used Outpost Firewall, which generally used to be a good firewall. But with the most recent overhaul, it's UI is now sluggish, and has unnecessary features such as "spyware protection" and "host protection" (to monitor everything and slow things down). It's also had some "issues" here and there, such as freezing the computer up, or having a CPU leak (so things got 65*C hot in PC land whilst I was in ZzZ land). So I think it might be time to say farewell.

I've used many firewalls in my time, and by far the most notorious in my opinion is Zone Alarm Pro. Going back several years, it was touted as one of the best firewalls around. My brother installed it on our computer. Though, for me, the troubles it caused where unbelievable, enough to justify a format. After a while, it would simply break the internet connection, permanently - you'd dial-up, and nothing would work. Removing Zone Alarm Pro wouldn't fix it either.

Usually this was because ZA had "corrupted the root certificates", or "locked down the connection" (which would leave the browser showing nothing but an error message, even after uninstalling - as it left components behind). Google search turned up unhelpful threads on discussion forums. Usually I'd just delete every reference to the firewall in regedit, if it didn't work, I'd format. My brother finally got the message after it screwed up our internet access a third time.

Staying on the topic of other firewalls, another one I didn't like was BlackICE, which I don't really have much experience with, since it simply caused a bluescreen of death when the computer booted up. That one was a pain to remove.

Moving onto the topic of anti-virus software. You don't need it. As long as you watch what you download, and use your commonsense, the chances of you getting a virus are very slim. I can say that anti-virus software has caused me more troubles than viruses themselves. Usually you can remove common viruses from msconfig, delete a few files, and that's it.

The main offenders here are NOD32 and McAfee. NOD32 2.7 is a great piece of software, however, NOD 32 3.0 is a piece of s**t - another piece of software that has been overhauled with a Vista-like interface.
I didn't actually think that NOD32 would have any reason to interfere with my internet access, but with all it's glorious protection features, it meant that opening my torrent client would leave my connection dead until a restart. And one nasty thing about security software, is that 99% of the time, you can't kill it in the task manager, even removing it from msconfig and disabling the service wouldn't kill the latest version of NOD32 from starting (thankfully an uninstall did).

The bottom line is that I hate security software. Feel free to comment on my ramblings.

And that is why I use AVG while sitting behind a router.

Ahhh the useless discussions of useless softwares...

well, we have to talk about something...

I used Zone Alarm for about 3 years, and had no trouble. It even stopped 1.5 million intrusions. But then I had a disk crash, and after getting things working again, Zone Alarm would work until I tried to torrent. Then the computer would just freeze up solid. After trying everything, I uninstalled zone alarm, and put in a p2p-friendly firewall. No problem since.

My virus scanner is VirusScan Enterprise which I got from work (this is a work computer). It came with an unlimited licence, and updates its signatures every week, no problem really.

I remember my days of Norton. With 512mb of RAM.

I hope someday we don't need all those security bastard software AVG somehow detected some my files as a threat when it not.