Hi, Yesterday I got tempted to uninstall Zone Alarm firewall and try Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall 4.5.916 due to issues between ZA and Utorrent. I had a stable Win Xp Home SP2 system with all updates, AVG Free antivirus, Windows Defender and Spybot S&D. With no viruses ever reported, nor any indication of them. Right after installing Kerio firewall, I noticed that I could not open applications, being blocked by the firewall by default. So I changed the settings in firewall configuration, however after some period of struggle with this software ( slowing system down, not updating its list of programs allowed for internet access and throwing dozens of popups and generally rendering system unusable, not exaggerating ) I decided to uninstall it. Rebooting system and getting rid of Kerio firewall apparently solved the problem and system seemed to be stable again. Later on, I decided to install Zone Alarm again, and now a few minutes after every reboot, when I start any application, it takes about 5 minutes to launch. So I restored the system to various checkpoints before it got messed up. Unfortunately it did not solve the issue. I have no firewall now, except Windows firewall, the system is still unstable and in a few minutes after logging in, it takes ages to launch any application. After this period, everything looks ok, applications start quickly, so it looks like: logged in: 2-3 minutes ok, after that for 5-7 minutes can't start applications, later all ok as for now I wanna emphasize that the system was very stable before and I have no new additional software in autostart ( msconfig checked ). Perhaps Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall left something behind ? Any ideas ? Cheers.