Zone Alarm which is use as firewall has really been letting me down and stuff. I like it cause it's free and all that but it seems swiss cheesy. A friend of mine sent me a copy of Sygates firewall and it seems to be better at stopping outgoing and incoming weirdness.
Feels good when it tells me it stopped something too..
I just made a post in the Firefox thread about security and stuff - and mentioned the following about firewalls:
"Like OddTodd, I have had issues with some of the latest incarnations of ZoneAlarm, and I now use Kerio. It works very well. If you use it, you should know that it IS free, but has some things in it that you pay for after a certain time frame. These things include pop-up blocking and so on, that dont work as well as technologies found in most modern browsers like Firefox. So - if you use it, after awhile it will start telling you your trial period is fixing to end - but you can just ignore it. All it will end up turning off is stuff that was somewhat of a pain to deal with anyway - in my opinion"
Kerio might be work a look for ya ;-)
One big problem is that alot of malware runs *through* IE - that is, it uses IE's mechanics to connect to the internet... so firewalls won't help much with this, because obviously firewalls cannot tell the difference between IE and something wrapped in IE's clothing, so to speak. *smirks*
One option (which is what I have grown to do) is to just completely disallow IE all together from your firewall. Whenever you use Windows Update, just temporarily use it to update, then firewall it back off again...
It is kinda sad that things have gotten to this point - but you *will* notice life will get a little better for you once you have stopped using IE for awhile.