Zone Alarm wants me to add Pest Patrol to my order to eliminate hackers, Trojans and spyware. Has anyone used this?

Pest Patrol

NQD: I'm not at all familiar with either Zone Alarm or Pest Patrol. Here's what I use:

NIS2002 - AntiVirus and FireWall
CookieWall - selective cookie stopper
POW - selective pop-up/under killer
ConnectionKeeper - never get booted
MailWasher - run this BEFORE you open your email program and "bounce & delete" all unknown emails before they get into your system.

In addition, I have ALL the virus removal tools saved on floppies for all my friends and relatives (& in the unlikely event I might get something nasty) who are lax about their PC security (The Roommate just had me disable the Automatic Anti-Virus Update feature "because it takes 15 minutes to download" every week; go figure!).

Most viruses, trojans, and worms arrive in emails (I believe) and the MailWasher basically puts all your emails in a "holding cell" so you can determine the guilty parties. It's already caught 3 attempts to send me "something" nasty (they were from, and to, the same address which wasn't mine); I bounced and deleted them immediately.

I've heard good things about ZoneAlarm and, if Pest Patrol is from the same people, you can probably trust it. One question: Do you have the free version of ZoneAlarm, or the purchased version? I'm asking because my NIS came with all the features described plus a firewall and parental control - after mail-in rebates, I spent about $40 at Best Buy.

I have Norton but find it more difficult to navigate than Zone Alarm. I used the free version of ZA once and now want to get the upgrade. Pest Patrol is a reduced price, add-on, when ordering but not a ZA product. I used to have POW, just wanted some feedback on the Pest Control. I use Hotmail and it won't work with Mailwasher unless I use Outlook.

NQ, you're using Norton Antivirus (if I recall correctly), which identifies and removes a huge variety of trojans. As for spyware and adware ("malware"), the absolutely best tool for their removal is still the free Ad-Aware. Be sure to get the most recent reference file also, and unzip it to the Ad-aware folder (C:\Program Files\Lavasoft Ad-Aware) to replace the older installed file.

Thanks Tom and Sonnet.