Using a router / Zone alarm

Very sensible ISP supplying a nat router by default. Cable operators should take note and supply a nat box or a cable modem with built in nat.

This is all normal.

This is impossible to answer because there are many other things you must do besides using a nat box and most of them rely on you increasing your own knowledge of computer security.

This is not because the numbers are different, it's because when an unsolicited connection request arrives at the nat box, the nat box doesn't know where it should go so it drops it. This is a good thing for home users. Connections which were solicited (such as email and web browsing) will work normally.

ZA won't see anything inbound for the above reason. Please note that it is a common mistake to think that firewall software (such as ZA) is the most important thing to install on a home PC.

In your posistion I would do the following:

1. Remove ZA (You don't really understand popups like "do you want services.exe to connect to 131.107.115.28" do you?)

1. Make sure an up to date virus scanner is installed. Example:
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1. Make sure you have all updates from
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2. If you are using Windows XP then SP2 should be installed and you should be using an administrator account only when you have to and a user account for all other work.

1. An occasional check with
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   be beneficial until you learn how to ensure it never finds anything worth removing.

Jason

the one thing I've never done before, and will now, is to use another account without admin privileges for day to day computing / internet access. I'll do that now.

I have an anti-virus running (AVG), have all the up to date MS updates and am using WXP SP2 and I can still use Thunderbird fine for email and newsgroups.

Again, thanks for the advice.

Robbie