Good antiviral and tips with Zonealarm

[ashaman]

Good morning people, I'd like to ask you two suggestions.

First and foremost: I had to defenestrate Norton Internet Security, and installed in its firewall stead Zone alarm. It works well, but on this very site and other sites it block any animated gif to work. For example this emoticon: was once animated, now it's static. Ans I stress ALL the animated gifs aren't so anymore. Is there a way to work around this?

And for last: do any of you know of a good antiviral to install that can live with Zone Alarm. I tried Avast, but it pretty much froze my PC. Had to enter in safe mode and uninstall it before I could use the PC again and for a moment the specter of a OS re-installation has gloomed over me. Never again. BTW, no Norton, please.

Let me know, please.

[ashaman]

Sorry, I'm an idiot. I was able to find info about the animated gifs and make so they are animated again. Sorry again, no reason for you to suggest me about that anymore.

The request for a suggestion about a working possibly freeware antiviral (that it's not AVAST, that froze my PC, nor Norton, that refuses to work) still stands. Please.

[Politically Incorrect]

Problem is you think you have removed Norton but I bet it is still there Norton is a bitch to get rid of.

For AV I would recommend NOD32, it is payware but it can't be beat. For free try AVG.
Depending on what type of internet connection you have I would get rid of Zonealarm and just use the Windows firewall. If your on a dial up connection you really don't need any firewall.
Zonealarm is known to not want to function along with other security products, Avast was probably not what froze your pc A awhile back I had installed Avast on a friends pc that also had Zonealarm and the same thing happened as soon as I removed Zonealarm Avast worked flawlessly.

All I run is NOD32, no firewall and haven't had a issue since switching to NOD32.

[ashaman]

Thanks for your reply, I contacted on the net a lot of people that tells me that NOD and ZoneAlarm live together perfectly, I'll try that.

Of Norton I know every little unholy thing, of the villainous beast I've removed manually each and every folder, one of these days I'll give an eye to the registry too. Not now though.

One of these days I'll buy me a router and switch and I will be able to go with no software firewall too, but for now I'm making due with USB ADSL modems. I'm not on a dial-up since... 2002, was it? :-? Can't really remember. And I'm online a lot of time. Going without firewall is a stunt I don't want to pull. The default firewall would be good enough for me, if it wasn't that it's even harder to configure than a hardware firewall (that I still don't have) and even less intuitive.

Zone Alarm works well for now, now to get NOD... later.