I've been reasonably impressed with and have used various Norton products over the years, from system utilities to anti-virus software.

I've been using ZoneAlarm firewall for a while and thought I'd give Norton Personal Firewall 2004 a go. Big Mistake.

The initial installation went smoothly enough, but despite my best post-configuration fine-tuning efforts, I could notget any of my browsers (IE, Opera, Mozilla) or mailtool (OE6) up and running - until I disabled NPF2004 features completely.

Out-of-the-box easy installation for novice users - maybe ? Easy post-installation tweaking ? Nope !

Not only that, but the install rendered all my removeable media (zip, floppy, CD, DVD) unuseable (they were there sure enough, Windows could no longer read anything in them !)

This rather nasty side-effect is actually documented on the Symantec Support site, so it appears other users are having similar problems. Uninstalling NPF2004 and Nero's InCD programme (which dont appear to get on so well together) and rebooting a couple of times eventually fixed the problem.

I've gone back to an (upgraded) version of ZoneAlarm and wont be bothering with this load of shite again.

P.S: I don't have performance problems - I'm running Windows XP-Home SP1 on a fast Athlon with 1Gb of DDR RAM and enough HDD to choke a horse.