Firstly let me say that I really don't have a dire need for a firewall since I'm behind a router and Vista's firewall provides adequate protection. However I've always liked Zone Alarm's "network activity" LED displaying in the system tray. I tried to install the newly released free 32 bit version for Vista without success. My Toshiba laptop meets all of the minimal requirements and with 2GB of RAM it's a smooth running machine. ZA seemed to install correctly and prompted me to reboot, but when I did ZA would never quite load and my CPU would show me utilizing 100% of my resources. Of course with that type of usage the laptop was virtually dead, I couldn't even open control panel. I'd reboot and get the same results. This isn't something I wanted to play around with and spend too much time troubleshooting. I suspect that this is a security problem even though I was using an Admin account. Could even have been Windows Firewall since I was never able to shut it down because at 100%........ Sure I could have disabled it from Safe-Mode but by then I was developing the "my God, what have I done" mind set. I know my way around computers and since this was nothing urgent....................
The only way I could recover was to boot into safe-mode and uninstall ZA. I think I'll wait awhile before trying ZA again on a Vista machine. Anyone know of any proven FREE firewalls for Vista.