I've had FREE ZoneAlarm, Kerio Personal Firewall, and Sygate Personal Firewall recommended (the last two via http://forum.grisoft.cz/freeforum/read.php...50719#msg-50719). Suggestions? Comparisons? Comments? Thanks!

ZoneAlarm for windows XP (free edition) seems to be easy to set-up for me and most I would think it is six of one and half a dozen of the other as to which one, one chooses from your list all are good AFAIK.

My signature also shows other programs one needs nowadays for computer security (or something similar)

Password Depot I find very good and works off a USB key (freeware for 20 complex passwords) this means you do not store passwords on your computer (If computer is compromised the Windows one is easily hackable). No doubt other types of "Password Savers" are also good

Kerio v4 had too much junk (most of which is disabled at the end of the trial period) for me. I still use v2. You can download it at http://download.kerio.com/dwn/kpf/kerio-pf-2.1.5-en-win.exe. I switched to Kerio a loooong time ago when ZA hosed up my VPN connections. Even completely disabling ZA didn't fix it - I had to completely uninstall it to fix my VPN issues.

I believe there are a few theoretical exploits that v2 could be susceptible too. Nearly impossible for someone to carry out unless they were specifically attacking you and knew a lot about your setup, if I remember correctly.

I've been meaning to check out the latest version of ZA, I just haven't gotten around to it, and Kerio has been working great for me. My biggest problem with Kerio v2 is that program signatures are all or nothing. ZA had a "changes frequently" option to disable signatures for a single program. This avoided alerts on games which were patched frequently, but alerted you to changes in other programs that shouldn't be changing.