I have used the firewall ZoneAlarm from www.zonelabs.com for a long time and I can strongly recommend it. Install it, and you can say goodbye to the problems that mangina had. You have total control of the traffic to and from the Internet, no nasty surprises. I have tested ZoneAlarm with several services on the Net that lets you test the security of your system. These services tries to simulate an attack on your system and a port scanning. The intention is to find out if anyone can gain access to your PC in order to plant viruses, trojans, retrieve information, passwords etc. With ZoneAlarm running, the result is always the same: - My system is undetectable when connected to the Net - No ports can be probed on my system whatsoever This means that no one can access my PC from the outside, because they can't even see that it's present on the Internet. I have also tested various applications that tries to contact the Internet from my PC. The result here is equally good. No applications can send info from my PC unless I specifically allow them to. Even if an application tries to masquerade as a legitimate application, i.e. Explorer, while trying to contact the Internet, ZoneAlarm will stop it. This is because ZoneAlarm generates a cryptographic signature for every trusted program. If some other application tries to access the Internet, it is stopped. To my knowledge, no other firewall provides this level of security. And the best thing is: ZoneAlarm is free! There are numerous firewalls on the market that costs more and performes less, so the choice is obvious.