Heads up: from the lovely people who brought you WinDoze comes their latest and greatest: Windows Security Update KB951748 once installed hoses some 3rd party firewall programs. If you haven't d/led it yet check with your vendor to see if you need a patch first, if you have you're either not susceptible, already patched, or aren't reading this. Microsludge changed something in the winsock dll that makes the firewall think all network traffic is an illegal attempt to breach the local network. Confirmed for Zonealarm; they put out a patch yesterday.

I'm so glad that my automatic update is OFF.

Cheers for the heads up OrionCA, I encountered the problem with one of the networked home pc's a couple of days ago. A restore to the day before fixed the problem but automatic updates reinstalled the patch and I was back at square one. I ended up downloading the latest version of ZoneAlarm and installing it over the old version, needless to say I wasn't happy... It seems MS have been causing alot of headaches lately. This is the press release of the workaround or fix provided by ZoneAlarm: http://download.zonealarm.com/bin/f...

Actually this fixes a major bug in DNS, and many poorly written programs (such as zonealarm) were broken by the update. Decent firewalls (such as McAfee or Blink) were not affected since they already dealt with the DNS cache issue 'properly' before MS even bothered. J. j e r u v y a t y a h o o d o t c o m

"Decent firewalls (such as McAfee or Blink) were not affected since they already dealt with the DNS cache issue 'properly' before MS even bothered." That might be true, but tell that to all the consumers that are without internet access and see how they react. Besides, one person trash is anothers treat. I'm not sure any of us are ni a position to recommend or not recommend certain 3rd party software firewalls. They are not all created equal for sure. But to say those two you mentioned are better than ZA is not a completely informed opinion because those are vastly different than ZA. Oh and if someone finds a link to all the reviews of all firewalls, look deeper. Even those are in consencus of what constitutes a good or bad firewall. The real losers here are the consumers. I squarely put the blame for the users of the MS operating system that can't get on the internet right now on MS itself. If they're going to be the "idustry leader" they should act like it and show some concern AND publish at least some notice about what this update does to some 3rd party firewalls. These 3rd party firewalls wouldn't be in existence if MS produced a firewall that was equivilent to them. I need to find the any key

No problems with Sygate here.