forum will not allow me to change or log in with firewall on

You must have cookies enabled to log on - says so on the website login screen.

If we migrated cookie data over onto the server it would get rid of your problem, and fix a number of other problems like read/unread threads on different computers. It was like this on TOF but I think TG are happy doing it this way :?

I'm using Firefox just fine. You must have fiddled with settings somewhere.

And speaking of annoying firewalls, just to be aware, at the office we have the Windows XP SP2 firewall running on some test machines (instead of ZA) and did you know that when it pops up a question asking you if you want to allow a program to talk over a TCP/IP port (for example) it doesn't block that port while it asks? It allows the app to just happily chatter away. Talk about M$ security!

So, in other words, don't trust M$'s firewall to do <peep> for you. Use ZA. Use whatever. (Use a hardware firewall if you can.) Just don't use M$'s firewall.

heh i have macafree virus scan enterprise on as wel... its got its own rules for me too... i have found a really useful site lol

https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

the shields up website is one that is best for testing all of ur ports, i dunno if they do anything bad to ur comp, but i haven't experinced any problems though

BTW, by adding forumz.tomshardware.com to ur trusted list in ZoneAlarm do not help this problem...

This is a major problem imo - how many people use ZoneAlarm! Loads! If this stops them from logging on I can't see them staying.

Cookie data to the server side!!!

Not a clue - But I'm noticing a lot of cookie related problems cropping up.