I dumped the Symantec Firewall, earlier this year, after using if for a number of years. It did its job quite well, never had an intrustion...but it was a heck of a hog and with each subsuquent update I began to have more and more problems with Win2k Pro.

I now use Agnitum Outpost Pro and have been quite pleased with its performance. The best part is that all the unusual software problems I been having when I had NIS installed have now disappeared.

Like BigGreenFurryThing mentioned, you can not completely unload the NIS or NAV process. You can stop current activity but if you look at running tasks you will see that NIS and NAV are still very much alive and eating up resources. With Outpost you can kill the process completely.

My next step is to get rid of NAV. The Symantec products have become registery gloats and for me, they seem to make the OS a bit unstable.

edit : I do not know much about this DEB, "disable extended bit" that is all the rave with Intel, but I do understand that it is causing some problems with XP-sp2 and the Intel processors that employ DEB. If someone knows more about this please enlighten us all. :)

Message edited on: 10/07/2004 18:32