Firewalls and Antivirus - do they conflict?

Have Windows XP Pro. Have Zone alarm and Panda antivirus - Zone alarm has antivirus settings - do I use them as well as Panda? Anything I should know? I have no idea what I am doing....

 

As a general rule you should have only one antivirus and one firewall running at a time. With the software set-up you have described above and you want to use both programs I would suggest the following.

1. That the windows fire wall is disabled.
2. That the firewall portion of ZoneAlarm is enabled
3. That the antivirus portion of ZoneAlarm is disabled
4. That the antivirus portion of Panda is enabled
5. If it is the Panda Security Suite that includes a firewall make sure it is disabled.

That would be the complicated way.

You could use just the ZoneAlarm suite (Antivirus & Firewall) or the Panda Suite (regardless with both of them be sure to disable the windows firewall), but if i remeber correctly they are both shareware requiring you to pay to either get full functionality or to use them after a certian time period.
The basic ZoneAlarm firewall is free and very good, I'm not sure about the basic Panda antivirus but I don't think is is free. There are several others that are very good and that are free. Just check the Antivirus section here at MajorGeeks for AntiVir, Avast, and AVG. You could also search the forums as there are several good threads on the various antivirus programs.