torrents and my firewall

[optic]

Well after downloading from a few torrents, I noticed that my Zone Alarm firewall Blocked Intrusions is going absolutely crazy which prevents me from playing online games, no CS for me tonight i guess. =(

Is this normal behavior after using a torrent?

[kurahashi]

No, it's normal behaviour after using Zone Alarm

[Switeck]

µTorrent tries to make potentially 100's of connections at once to various peers and seeds.

Even after YOU close µTorrent, these same peers and seeds may try to "call back" to connect to you again. Likely THIS is what your firewall is blocking.

And if the torrents you've downloaded had 1000's of peers and seeds that can be VERY bad! Zone Alarm will likely cripple your system under those rates, it's just not a good program.

I made this post as examples of its problems:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=271767#p271767

[optic]

Thanks Switeck, thats good to know. So i guess I'll be ditching Zone alarm for something else now. What do you recommend for a firewall? Is Comodo any good?

[Switeck]

Comodo should work well, but there's some trickiness to configuring it...search this forum for details on that...I don't know. ><

[Firon]

Outpost is "okay."

[PackRatt]

As a follow up note on Comodo, I been using and really like in most areas except for Utorrent. It worked perfectly a couple times but then keeps re-blocking my port. Still working on the issue, but Comodo is great overall, well worth trying at least.