I have zone alarm, but its not all that great. Use Black Ice which is really great. I finally got around to putting my puter on a router with a built in firewall. Yeah, disconnect from the broadband when you're not using the internet. Get that IP changed, or reset/renew if you don't want to disconnect. It is good to learn about different types of intrusions and what they are. I'm getting good at it. The other day, some jerk was running a port scan on my system looking for open ports. Black ice was going off every second. I did a dns lookup and figured out who it was, then a 411.com and gave the guy a call and asked him if he had anything else to do. That shook him up like crazy.