>The ZoneAlarm lets you know when servers are trying to establish a connection and YOU give the OK for them. It is worth keeping for that. You could have an email that starts a service or click on a button on a page that does the same thing.
>
>I have used ZA for over a year now and love it. I try to get in from work and I can't see the blasted thing.
>
>Running Nabster somtimes it's great that it works but you still can't ping it.
>
>__Stephen
>
>>>>By default the Linksys has every port disabled. I only enabled port 80.
>>>
>>>While we're on the subject, check out http://grc.com/default.htm. The ShieldsUp tool may surprise you (though it won't surprise Zone Alarm users). I found it to be a big help in setting up Proxy Server.
>>
>>Been there, done that. I got the initial surprise, then closed off everything. The linksys router has been great for that as well as the Zonealarm. I did run his Optout program again last week, and there were a couple of offending dlls sitting on my hard drive. I promptly removed them. For those who don't know Optout scans your hard drives for know programs that will send your information to sites over the internet w/o your knowledge.

Yeah, if you combine that with a Linksys router you can open ports that will allow you to get through to run VNC or pcAnywhere providing you're not using DHCP. It becomes somewhat problematic to determine your ip address though because they change from time to time. You could automate posting your current ip address though to another site.