hello,
the posts here have been lots of help Suberme "And did you check if the firewall was running when you went to Start>Outpost firewall, if in fact it was already running, i don't think it would have popped up, just click on the icon in the lower right hand corner."

i don't think it was running at all cause there was no icon in the right corner. I installed Zone Alarm on tope of outpost -so i had something i could count on untill i solved the problem- they did in fact have problems running together. i have heard allot of good about cygate that i just uninstalled outpost and am now running cygate and zone alarm on top of one anouther and they seem to function very smoothly together. the reason i want 2 running is like owl said. somethings one catches the other would not. i have heard Lots of good about zone alarm but i have heard of people being able to pass it.
I like the idea of a hardware firewall but i am sure i don't have the smarts to put all that together at this stage of things .
thanks for all help on this,
mark smith