Internal Traffic on PC is very slow

Start by removing ZA and see if the problem goes away. Get yourself an external firewall box or a modem with built in firewall features unless your modem is already more than just a modem.

Jason

as described in other threads, I am using

celeron 1.7/ 40 GB/ 256MB on xpsp2 Zone Alarm 6.1.737 free avg antivirus poptray spampal Thunderbird Hamster (local server) XanaNews

My Beetle 220BX ADSL2 modem is connected to Realtek LAN port. I have 256kpbs unlimited broadband.

For a few days, I am observing that while the net traffic is good as it can ever be, the internal traffic between programs has become very-very-very slow.

By internal traffic, I mean the transfer of data between the programs.

Hamster to/ fro XanaNews Hamster to/fro Thunderbird

previously, it was going at the blink of the eye, but not it is often at snail's pace, and sometime entire system gets hang for a few seconds.

I think some of the above programs are putting certain additional layers of check which is slowing my system down.

I don't want any firewall, and antivirus, and spamguard to check the traffic between the programs which are there on my pc, and their data have already been checked when it arrived from the net to the first program.

My zonealaram only has Realtek as the internet zone. Should I add 127.0.0.1 as the trusted zone in zonealarm? What could be the drawback of this approach?

How to find out the culprit(s), and tame that?

Thanks.