Bl**dy personal firewalls

[zag]

All,

I used to have (and more or less trust) ZoneAlarm to act as a personal firewall on my home PC.

All was well and good.

However, now that I have upgraded to XP SP2 and have a choice of using the Windows firewall and/or ZoneAlarm I'm starting to get conflicting messages and I can *definitely* see unwanted established connections into my machine, so neither of them are doing their job.

There is an option in ZoneAlarm which says "Turn off Windows Firewall" (it's currently checked) and there is an option in the windows security centre thing where yesterday I told it to turn on Windows firewall.

Result is I'm not entirely sure which firewall is enabled and I'm certain I gave neither of them permission to allow outbound connections to some random host on port 10560 or allowed inbound connections to my port 1259.

I'm going to disable ZoneAlarm and turn on full security on the Windows firewall and see what happens.

Has anyone else had this happen with ZoneAlarm - looks like it's working but doesn't seem to be ?

z

 

[ClubMan]

Not sure if it's relevant here but, as with many other programs, some versions of ZoneAlarm will not work properly after XPSP2 is installed and you may need to upgrade to a later version.

On the general issue of which to run as far as I can see from browsing around (e.g. here) even if you enable the XP firewall you should continue to use ZoneAlarm or some other third party firewall.