I installed a firewall ZoneAlarm and Mailwasher, and now when I try to access my Hotmail account I get the message:

"The connection was refused by 7fd.bay7.hotmail.msn. com."

So I switched off both new software programs and tried again, and -- same message.

I'm running under Windows 98 and accessing he net using Mozilla.

(Before I was relying on Spybot, Registry Mechanic and AVG 6.0 to keep me safe. It did, too, until a friend scared me silly about not having a firewall. Actually I had more problems with software conflicts and IE upgrades than with viruses or other malicious thingies.)

So does this mean I have to choose between Hotmail and ZoneAlarm/Mailwasher?

Alright, I did a search of your problem and it turns out it's fairly common. The solution I found is to upgrade Zonealarm to 3.7.193. Here's the thread that came up on my search.

Thanks, Mx2, I'll try it.

(Hmmm. Wonder what was the 'new little problem' Castlecops ran into?)