My OS is Windows XP Home. It was installed on the 15th of December 2005 together with my security programmes - ZoneAlarm v.6.1737.000; AVG 7.0; Trojan Hunter, TDS Process Guard; Ad-Aware Personal, SpywareBlaster; SpywareGuard; and Microsoft Antispyware. The security programmes are always enabled and they are updated twice a day.

Zone Alarm shows me that during the past 20 days it has blocked 20208 intrusions, of which 3788 were highly rated. Its Firewall has blocked 20213 attempts, and 32 programmes have been secured for the Internet.

My computer has a Broadband connection for perhaps eight or nine hours a day. I rarely surf and I avoid doubtful sites.

Should I be receiving a thousand intrusions every ten hours ?

Zone Alarm was highly recommended but its high detection rate has me wondering if it shows too many false positives.

oldsoldier

I've been using ZA Security Suite for about two years and had no problems with it. I checked it out with a Tech talk forum, Myway Tech Talk. Extremely knowledgable people on there and they are all of the opinion that ZA is one of the very best anti spyware/virus scanners/Firewall out there. Stick with it, it will keep you safe. If you go in to ZA Alerts and Logs you can turn off the notifications and ZA will happily run in the background and do it's thing without bothering you. Although the quantity of alerts you are getting appears high it's nothing to be concerned about.

In essence yes this is normal backgroung traffic {Noise}

You are on your ISP's network along with thousands of other computers.
As long as your modem is hooked up and on you will receive traffic.

Most of it is not even directed at you specifically [it is called broadcast] traffic it goes to everyone on the wire. Some will be pings from robots searching for open connections.
As long as your firewall is blocking them you are ok.

Thank you. I shall keep it.