Ok basicly, I am sick of the lame *** people out there who have nothin better to do then hack. I have zonealarm runing, and have tried many many other firewalls, however no luck. Za is showing icons with the shared icon, like generic host process for win32 is being shared, msn shared, and i have had enough. Anyone know of a good strong firewall if that be software wise or hardware wise i dont care as long as it works. A freind at work said, if u network your computer to a **** computer, and use the internet they can only hack the computer that is hosting the internet, is this true?. if this is true and it is a strong firewall i will do this.

If your not happy with ZA try Outpost www.agnitum.com it only allows what you set unlike zone alarm.
Alternitavely get your self a hardware firewall the best way for this is get a 486 PC and install red hat Linux on it the rest all comes with Red hat or you can instal something like IP cop.

For more info search www.google.com
for hardware firewalls or "setting up a firewall with Red hat linux" include the quotes you might want to check www.google.com/linux for that.

Why don't you jsut configure Zone Alarm properly? Double click the ZA icon, go to program control and turn off the access for anything you don't want to allow to connect to the net like MSN.

Can a hacker only access the PC directly connected to the net?, no, if they can get passed the firewall then they can access the network running from the first PC and thus access all other PCs connected to it.

You can't get 100% security on the net, all you can do is make it harder for hackers to access your PC. ZoneAlarm has been rated as one of the best firewalls around, if you want additional protection upgrade to ZoneAlarm pro.

Outpost lets you set firewall rules with ease which is more secure than zonealarm not sure about the Pro version but I dont think that lets you set up rules. But what you want to do is disable or disallow any servers you have running. Processes for Win 32 is just M$ calling home and you can disallow messanger server rights and it still runs fine I think the server rights are only needed for all the spyware in msn messanger.

i Did try Outpost but even though i uninstalled za outpost said it detected a firewall running called za and can cause crashes, and not let me use the intenet and thats exactly what happened, so I had to uninstall outpost and install za again, now i'm stuck with it.

I think taht will be XP's built in firewall which isnt very good to put it midly. Im not surer how you disable it but it should be under control pannel somewhere maybe add remove software or system.

No its not xp firewall because i already disabled it, its something za has left behind that I cant find, its a service that is still running because outpost detects it.

Thx though