[Roadie]

I have Zone Alarm Free installed on my winvista system. While online I received a message form my firefox browser; "connection lost, the session was reset", then one of zone alarms programs permission alerts, to allow or not allow a program web access, followed. The zone alarm permission alert was: "svchost is trying to access the internet, would you like to allow this?" I clicked no since I had done this many times before with no problems. This time I could not regain a connection. Then I went into zone alarms programs tab and clicked "allow" for all items except server permission with regards to svchost. Should I allow svchost server permission? I believe svchost is part of the windows oper system so I'm guessing it's ok to let it have sever rights. I tried to post this at the zone alarm forum but the create an account page would not let me create an account (said my username contained irrelevant data?). Anyway, in the meantime I'm using windows firewall. Thought I would ask here before messing with it for the time being. Is windows firewall as good as a third party firewall? Any ideas? Thanks for your help.

[lunarlander]

svchost is a hub type of program where other apps access the net through it. To see which apps are using svchost, open a cmd window and type 'tasklist /svc".

I don't think your firefox problem is related to svchost.

I don't use remote desktop, share folders nor printers; so there's nothing on the network that needs to access any server processes on my pc. Thus I won't grant server permissions to anything on the firewall.

I am using the Vista firewall only and I use the public profile. Look at the firewall inbound rules and determine what you want to allow in. Be aware that some rules are part of several profiles ( drag to widen the Profile column ). I have disabled almost everything inbound.

[Roadie]

Thanks for the tips, Lander. Windows Vista Firewall seems to be doing OK, since I've got a "resident" anti-virus-and anti-spyware program running and it's not reporting any problems. I'll take your advice. I never knew what server permission was for, and don't use any of the services you mentioned, so I'll use the settings you suggested. Thanks for the help.