I am sure she could grasp using gmail it is fairly easy and all she has to do is use her browser and she does that to view any website just save gmail as a fave so she can find it easily. I personally would set her up with firefox instead of IE for ease of use and safety and then you could simply put the gmail link directly on the bookmarks toolbar so it is right there for her to click on and set gmail up to remember her info. If she has Vista the firewall in it should be ok for her just make sure once you remove za you turn on the windows firewall in security center. for antivirus I am not sure what you are using but I also like AVAST free you do have to do a real easy quick registration that they send to your email but then it is set , you have to do the register thing about once a year. I would make sure you put some good anti malware programs on there and show her how to open them update them and run a full scan with them have her set up a schedule once a week to run her scans when her pc is on, these 2 are the best SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware she will have to remember to hit the update button before scanning. Also good to have is spywareblaster, this one is not a scanner for it just open it once a week hit update, hit enable all protection, the shield turns green that is it. SpywareBlaster and I agree congrats to her for being willing to take on the technology world! Definitely set up windows auto updates to do them automatically for her she definitely wants to get those and make her understand she does have to leave the computer on so that her programs get their updates. That is one big issue I run into with some elderly, they think they only want to turn it on when they need it then the pc gets way behind on updates and when it is turned on everything tries to update at once and it can be a big mess. leaving it on does not hurt anything mine stay on 24/7. for that reason it is really safer to leave it on rather than keep it off! She could schedule her scans to happen at night while she is asleep.

I don't know zone alarms well, nor firefox too well, its not my normal everyday browser. But I do know that firefox will disable any 'Plug-ins, Add-ons, Extensions, etc that are incompatible with it. This does not mean ZoneAlarms is not acting as firewall. It only means that whatever plug in for some kind of added protection beyond the normal firewall rules isn't working. Might possibly be you could uninstall zone alarms completely somehow, and reinstall it completely fresh... hopefully zone alarms is smart enough it would recognize the particular plug in isn't compatible with current firefox versions and not install that plugin, but perhaps maybe a different one. I'm just guessing.. I really don't have much respect for zone alarms from years ago experiences and don't know if they have code writers that would check compatibilities now or not - but for something as popular as firefox they certainly should. This post was edited by mikie on Wed, Apr 17, 13 at 23:51

go to that webshield area like above and look where it says scanned count if that shows actual numbers as a count and not zero or if you go to pages and that number does change it is ok if it is not changing then there could be a problem. Do you have zone alarm by any chance? because for some of us there was a conflict and we had to change a proxy setting in our browsers when using Avast. There is a thread on here about that which may turn up on a search, I had posted the directions on how to set it up. This page from the Avast forum also tells how to do that. Configuration of the Web Shield HTTP proxy

unfortunately it is extremely important so some way some how we will all have to do this. Here are articles to help you get an understanding on this DNS vulnerbility which the patch is for. The DNS converts the words you type in the address bar into a numerical address thatÂs used to route all Internet traffic. Exploiting an error like that would make phishing scams simple  people would think they were at their bank website and happily type in personal details, which the criminals could then harvest. Internet flaw could let hackers take over the Web Deficiencies in the DNS protocol Major DNS flaw could disrupt the Internet this is the site where you can find the DNS checker to have it run on your pc and see what it says about your system and how vulnerable it is. DNS Checker For those that are needing to completely remove ZA from their system many people are reporting using this program to get a clean full uninstall, it is a free uninstall program which works well to remove many programs that can tend to be hard to remove. I personally have not used it but several people on the tech sites are recommending it. Revo Uninstaller Zone Alarm also has detailed instructions on their site on how to do a clean uninstall should you need it.