has anyone ever managed to get this firewall to be able to work properly and have their computer start up quite quickly? Until May 2006 this was a great firewall, I try it now and again and it slows my computer down by quite a lot... it slows down my startup by about a minute.

I would love to be able to go back to this but it is so slow (is it something to do with vsmon.exe?).

I use Comodo but I would prefer it if ZA could work properly...

The newer versions are just bloated. I found comodo to be about the same.
I've given up on software firewalls. I'll just use my router and the windows one. If I'm on a public network I just go into the windows firewall and choose no exceptions. Seems to be working well enough.