i noticed that having a firewall is very important & is a necessity now a days. i'm average in computer knowledge; so i'd like to know what is the best or most compatible firewall with bit torrent client applications such as azureus? i use azureus & sometimes uTorrent.

best or most compatible - meaning which will not slow down the performance of my machine in terms of cpu & memory usage; that'll not conflict with azureus or uTorrent. and especially firewall that'll not be noisy & annoying or just doesn't keep on prompting for warning & asking permission or anything in that manner while azureus is downloading.

by the way, please kindly move this topic if it shouldn't be posted here.

You are quite right about having a firewall and using it. I might suggest Sygate Personal Firewall, since it allows you to manage permissions by application, and is light on resources. Almost all firewalls will at the very least, prompt on the first use, but you can usually tell them to "always allow" the application access.
You can find a link to the free download in this BC pinned topic:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic3616.html

Regards,
John

thanks very much. appreciate it. is it okay to pm you when i encounter some prob or techy things with spygate personal firewall?