How is Sygate Firewall?

I recently started having trouble with PC Tools Firewall it started causing BSODs and would usually corrupt it's own files everytime a application is installed, patched, or run/uninstalled. It was getting really annoying so I went to Comodo which is really, really complex and gives me no way to effectively manage the permissions of my applications nor to check their status and it was almost like learning a new OS.

So I installed SP1 and installed Zonealarm however they never fixed the problem with Firefox, the OS itself was much slower, and even simple stuff like Startup and shutting down was long. And both Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5.1 suffer from memory leaks 2-5 minutes in and then would freeze or refuse to terminate. It got so bad I attempted to uninstall SP1, I got lucky, and was able to do so but I had to do it from Programs and Features.

Now I have a pre SP1 Vista again and it's purring like a kitten. But I now have a problem though Zonealarm runs at startup it doesn't support pre SP1 Vista anymore so no more updates but it's currently installed since I did it when SP1 was still on the PC. I have no idea what to do with Zonealarm now but I doubt I'll get full protection. Other then finding the last pre SP1 release how is Sygate's Firewall? Is it really easy to use like Zonealarm?

Also I heard Sygate was bought out by Symantec and they discontinued the free version. So is there any alternatives left? I just can't go back to SP1 a third time it causes more problems then it's worth on my system and makes it, quite frankly, unusable. And it leaves me feeling more vulnerable with it then without it.

 

Have you considered uninstalling IE 8 and trying your system as is? Only asking in the IE 8 has caused problems on some systems.