Steve, As an @home.com cable internet customer I find that for me a firewall (Zone Alarm) does not slow me down while most of the proxies I use do slow me down. In fact, some of the proxies do not allow images through and/or restrict access to areas within their domain only. As far as @home.com using a proxy/firewall, all I know is that when I check to see what websites are listing as my IP address (when surfing without my proxies) it comes up with ME. (You can go to a couple of sites to check whether or not they see you: http://www.nic.mil and http://kid.pagecount.com/kid/tellip/.) So I would have to say that whatever proxy they may be using, it is not providing me (and you, probably) any level of anonymity. By the way, I use a couple of different websites that are rather large and I compare download speeds (after clearing the cache) between proxies and no proxies (http://www.rense.com/ and http://www.apfn.org/apfn/apfncont.htm). Also, there are a number of sites for testing your speed. Try http://209.61.187.19/speedtest/index.html and http://www.testmyspeed.com/. Hth. Brian Sanburn <<< you wrote... >>> The recent talk about Firewalls in general and Zone Alarm specifically makes me wonder... Does installing a firewall on a cable modem affect the performance while browsing, downloading files, etc.? If so, is it noticeable? Also, my ISP (Home.com) uses a proxy/firewall on their network, according to their techs, and therefore a personal firewall isn't necessary. Anyone believe this statement? Thanks, Steve Snyder [log in to unmask] PCSOFT maintains many useful files for download visit our download web page at: http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml PCSOFT maintains many useful files for download visit our download web page at: http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml