My backup ISP is (b) but they recommend personal firewall because their firewall don't protect from attacks from neighbor computer. They also recommend antivirus programs even they scan e-mails against viruses. There is always new viruses what AV programs don't recognize and personal firewall is good to detect them. Toomas ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Gillett" <[log in to unmask]> > If your ISP (a) owned the PC, and (b) was taking steps in their network to > firewall your traffic, then it might be appropriate for them to instruct you > not to install one. Since neither of these is likely to be true, I would > assume that their advice is based on time wasted trouble-shooting "not > working" connections, only to discover that the connection was fine and just > a misconfigured firewsll was blocking traffic. The recommendation is in > their interest, not yours. > > There's a free version of Zone Alarm which is a pretty good place to > start. > > David Gillett > Curious about the people moderating your messages? Visit our staff web site: http://freepctech.com/staff.shtml