Hi everyone. Am new to this forum so I hope I am being mannerly enough ;-) tho am not new to being online, having chatted in icq and yahoo for about 7 years now. Yet no matter how long u chat for u always end up feeling like a newbie (lol!) cos things are constantly changing. For me, it's been great being online (esp as I met my husband in chat!) yet sometimes u have difficulties and mine is starting fresh on a comp given to us by a family member. It has XP (which I don't like too much) and came complete with a trojan, which we seem to hv successfully rid ourselves of - though there are still some strange goings on that am not sure whether are connected or not - such as msnmsgs.exe suddenly starting to launch itself even when messenger is not activated. This wasn't happening b4. I dropped it in the bin just in case. Can always get it again. Anyway, we hv been trying to sort out our security and I am hoping I can get some assistance with this.

The story thus far is:

I hv been trialling Sygate Personal Firewall Pro 5.5 which I like and feel I can use (esp like the backtrace which is helpful in making decisions about what to allow/not allow), but the only prob I have is it has no antivirus prog. Some say u don't need if u have gd firewall but I would prefer to hv. So then I trialled Symantec's package with Norton Internet Security and Norton Antivirus (both 2004) which I heard was supposed to be very easy to use but I have not found it to be so. I don't get enough info to decide what to allow/not allow and hv sometimes made bad decision and ended up being unable to do things I want to do then had to work out what to chg. This is proving frustrating and time consuming.

So I disabled Norton firewall, enabled Norton antivirus and enabled Sygate firewall and all has been working well - apart from one thing. My trials are almost ended and I have to make decisions and what I am using could prove expensive and we are broke half the time.

Also, even if I did choose to have Sygate firewall with Norton antivirus (and they seem quite compatible. No fistycuffs thus far!) I have questions as to whether to totally uninstall the Norton trialware which was a pkg incl firewall and antivirus together so I can replace with just antivirus part. Or can I just uninstall the firewall part? I want to do this as simply as possible as I am one of those who is intermediate with what I know (prob the most dangerous - a little info can be a dangerous thing!!!).

Can anyone assist me in making my decisions etc.?

Ash :-)