Need a new firewall, sick of ZoneAlarm.

[Loony BoB]

I've been using ZoneAlarm for quite some time now and have grown sick of it as it sucks up my resources like mad, often making it so that I can't even watch a video without it lagging or something once very half hour or so, regardless of the fact that I'm not actively using the internet. Apparently it's something to do with the vsmon.exe file and I've searched for that around the web and the fixes are generally non-existant (eg. "try reinstalling" or "get the paid version").

Can anyone give me some good examples of decent firewalls? Preferrably freeware, obviously. Please do not mention "Linux" or "reinstall Windows".

[crono_logical]

Looks like BoB's finally hit with that TrueVector bug in ZoneAlarm that can only be fixed (as far as I know) by removing Zonealarm, or reinstalling Windows if you want to keep ZoneAlarm Seeing as you don't want to keep ZoneAlarm though, I guess the latter doesn't apply to you yet Maybe that "get the paid version" solution means that bug is deliberate?

I'd recommend Tiny Personal Firewall v2.x or Kerio Personal Firewall v2.x for Windows - they're very similar to each other anyway. I think the newer versions of both are a bit bloaty, and I think you have to pay for a pro version if you want it to work as a gateway on a network with shared internet access too. But the free version of v2 is good enough for most things. These are both more complex to set up than ZoneAlarm, but they give you far greater control than ZoneAlarm is capable of.

I do not recommend BlackIce Defender, as that is actually more problematic than having no firewall installed, strangely enough.