I discovered what I considered two good programs to protect my computer, in addition to antispyware and antivirus programs I already had.

One was BufferZone Pro that I found secured my comuter through virtualization (meaning that your internet downloads work in quarantine, never impacting your computer, and the programs running in vurtual BufferZone can never attack your system. You can download and install anything you want from the internet, run it in BufferZone and stop worrying about data theft, system crashes and reformatting due to malicious code, spyware and other malicious code that can harm your computer). It surprisingly works very well.

The other program is called ProtoWall, described as a lightweight application which runs in the background, taking up little CPU and memory, while blocking thousands of bad IP addresses. In Protowall, all the work is done by the driver that filters each packet, extracts the IP header and then compares the address with the ones in the table, then either discards or permits the packet to pass. This is a free program, and I initially had a problem installing the driver. Found I had to install it manually or it would not work.

It was not supposed to interfere with my Online Armor firewall, but after using it for one day, it shut down my browsers (Internet Explorer 8 and Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta 4) so I could not access the internet. I think it might have denied access of the outgoing packets, but I could not figure out a way to instruct it to grant them access, and finally had to uninstall ProtoWall.

Has anyone else had problems with that program? And, if so, how did you solve that problem? It seemed like it could be quite useful if you understood what to do and not to do to make it work properly.

ricochet

Microsoft advises using only one firewall at a time [including windows firewall] since when using more than one they can interfere with each other. So if you are having trouble connecting with 2 running then I would disable one and then try again [you might have to reboot]. If with only one program enabled you can connect then they where messing each other up and one should subsequently be removed. Personally I haven't used either so I can't advise you beyond that. In addition you are using a beta version of FF which that in itself could be a problem but I don't think that it would interfere with IE though