a good firewall

Hay /comp/,

What's your favorite firewall program?
I have zonealarm and IMO it is not so great.
After tweaking it to allow minimal traffic to/from my computer, it ran fine for months until all of a sudden it started giving me Generic Host Process Blocked messages from various DNS caches from my ISP. 

>>16
If you're running with a software firewall, you might as well run the machine naked anyway. Software firewalls only give the illusion of safety, even though they're probably only adding additional holes to your system.

Really, if you don't have a hardware firewall, your best bet still is:
a) Don't use Internet Explorer
b) Don't use Outlook
c) Scan all downloaded applications
d) Keep all your software up to date

I've run an XP box like this for several years as well, and never had issues.