Pinecone, I have known people who just use the built-in Windows firewall, however the downside is it does not monitor outbound traffic. I would like to think that most, but not all, people would agree that a third party firewall that monitors both inbound and outbound traffic is the best way to go. Regardless of how careful some consider themselves to be on the internet there is always that chance of getting infected by malware one way or the other that may try to 'call home' with your personal information. http://netsecurity.about.com/od/firewalls/a/aa081804b.htm "Is there any way to know for sure what I am changing?? " As Luis stated Zone Alarm will present you with a pop-up window letting you know that an application or program wants to access the internet. It will give you the option of 'Yes' or 'No' and list the application that wants access, such as 'Internet Explorer' or whatever programs you have. There is also a 'More info' button in the alert. If the program is one you recognize and use all the time, you can click 'Yes' and select the box 'Remember this info_______' to keep from being bothered with the same request all the time. If it is a program you don't recognize I would click 'No', but not necessarily select 'Remember this info'. If the request keeps coming up and you don't recognize the program and the 'More info' button does not give you the info you need you may want to 'google' and see what it says. There are some 'Windows applications' that need internet access on occasion. Witz

Jane, I do not have Vista but help a few who do. From reports I have read elsewhere it would certainly appear that the MS firewall is a capable program. Any negative comments seem to come from the anti MS crowd rather than with substantial info to support any doubts on the firewall. As I noted I was asking out of curiosity in case perhaps you had read anything to suggest the MS firewall was not up to par. Grandms you can at any time click on the Zonealarm icon to bring up the window then click to check for updates - or wait out the 60 days,

I got the download from CNET, which I believe is trustworthy. I went and took a better look at some of the explanations for ZA (had a bit of trouble getting at them) and realized that I had been unfair in some of what I wrote. ZA has switched the Program control functions in the left and right-hand panels, and I got confused. The new version either decides for you whether a site is trustworthy, or asks you for permission when it wants to act as server.That is handled by "Smart Defense" in the left-hand panel, sometimes automatically and sometimes asking the user for permission when a program wants to act as server. The right-hand panel NOW (which used to be for server permissions) seems to be taking care of what used to be in the left panel, that is, simply to grant or refuse Access, under the headings "Trusted" and "Internet." I still don't know why there are these two items to be checked, but figure I can give green checkmarks to anything that I had checked in the left panel of the old ZA. Sorry this is so complicated; just wanted to set things straight. In the cases where I complained that ZA had presumptuously changed my settings to green checkmarks, the items were probably things that ZA handles automatically. Things are noted as "auto" or "custom."

That is not the case for most users, have you done the registration? did you try a reboot? here is the evidence that the new versions can be moved to high. this is the free This is a post from dslr from a user that had his show no high option also and what his experience was "I continued playing with this and wanted to update folks based on this. I downloaded revo uninstaller to help me remove ZA. As I was playing with ZA, I noticed that I now had high security set in ZA! What?!! Where before it would not let me change the setting from medium to high (it displayed a message saying this was only available in ZA Pro) now it was automatically set to High! I looked at the version info to be sure ZA did not somehow give me a PRO version. Still shows free version, but now I can set it to HIGH security. I don't know what changed, except perhaps the "registration" took place between these two settings. I agreed to register this free version, and all I can think of is sometime after I installed/rebooted/ran it, the registration completed and ZA now allows me to set the security to high. This is really odd behavior. Right now i am running ver. 7.0.483.00 and it is now letting me run stealth mode (I think!). I am going to do some tests to see that stealth mode is actually enabled. Will post an update if I find that is not the case. Sorry if I caused a ruckus, but I have never seen any FW do something like this. Has anyone else see this particular issue?" so it does go to high. this is the suite on high