I've looked and can't see..

that anyone else has had the same problem. One person had had some problem like mine but his seemed to be that the firewall was somehow being shut off, not my problem.
1st no flames!
I installed the firewall and was happy to see it really did not affect my normal operations, or so I thought…it took several days and an update of AVG antivirus to show the problem. AVG e-mail scanner that ships with version 7.5 will not work on any of my machines with CPF installed. The scanner will not allow the download of any mail from any of my POP3 accounts. If I disable the firewall, no problems, but not good permanent solution. If I disable the e-mail scanner of AVG, no problems, but again not a good permanent solution. I went to the AVG site and saw that the fix was supposed to be to make express rules about the executables of AVG in the firewall. I did so and it did not help.
I then thought that since the firewall was [otherwise] working so well, I’d try the antivirus product. This turned out to be a really bad idea as the antivirus made my machine [admittedly the slowest one I own] noticeably slower. I really liked the fact I could adjust the scan time, and use rules for what was scanned [unlike the AVG free product]. The daily scans of my disk weren’t that bad as far as slowing of the machine further, but the resident portion of the antivirus was unbearable. I had gone from being able to download binaries from newsgroups, burning DVDs of other files, and playing some form of solitaire concurrently, to barely being able to burn DVD’s without buffer underruns. This was totally unacceptable. I uninstalled the antivirus product [or so I thought] and rebooted. Two and a half hours later I had removed the last of this product. I am a computer professional so after having it take me this long to alleviate the product trying to reinstall itself I became acutely aware of how unnerving it must be for those with only passing knowledge of what was happening. This product is the victim of an egregiously bad uninstall routine. [in modern vernacular IT SUCKS]. I then was pleasantly surprised at how well behaved the uninstaller for the firewall was. No fuss, no muss, no bother.
I then went back to AVG Free 7.5 and Sygate Personal as they have never let me down. DO NOT TAKE this as just a slam. I will continue to check in as 1] I am deeply grateful to anyone who offers a product to help me for free 2] I am sure it will get better with time [not too much time I hope] and 3] I really LIKE the UI of these programs, they look really nice and have good readability …I didn’t have to go to a help file to access the common controls. BTW, the machine I am taling about is an Athlon 900 Thunderbird in a Shuttle AI61 Irongate motherboard with 768MB of RAM. All my other machines in my house have faster procs and 1-2 GB of much faster memory. However, it seems that many of my customers have machines comparable to this one [and several of those people who post here] so this tends to “keep it real” as to expectations. If the problems with the firewall and the AVG scanner can be worked out I would switch back immediately. As for the AV product, I would have to see a HUGE improvement in the uninstall routine, and then a smaller cpu usage of the resident portion to switch back.
Again, thank you so much for your efforts and I WILL be back.

Hi guru_v, welcome to the forums.

The AVG email scanner is a known issue. This is from CPFs Help…

[b]Skip advanced security checks[/b]

This option is for applications which user allows but still for some reasons they fail to connect. eg. AVG e-mail scanner.

So, whilst I don’t personnally have AVG, I believe that setting the AVG email scanner process to “Skip advanced security checks” in CPFs Application Monitor will resolve this issue.

CAVS: I’m not sure which version you tried, but I also had problems with CAVS 1.1 (the release version). CAVS 2 is currently in beta testing & it is still early in the testing cycle. So, checking back on CAVS in a few weeks is a good idea.

Actually, there are 3 options:

  1. Double-click on a rule you have already configured for the AVG mail scanner executable (preferably the first one). Now go into the ‘Miscellaneous’ tab and mark ‘skip advanced security checks’. Click ‘OK’. You can also mark the ‘Allow invisible connection attempts’ since it’s AVG, right?

  2. Double-click on a rule you have already configured for the AVG mail scanner executable (preferably the first one). As you look at the rule, you will see that the default is ‘Apply the following criteria’ (Just above the ‘General’ tab). Now mark ‘Allow all activities for this application’ and click ‘OK’.

  3. Security - Tasks - Define a New Trusted Application. Here you can select an application which you would like to grant Full Internet Access rights. You can browse for the executable through the ‘browse’ utility.

Hope this helps.

Paul Wynant
Moscow, Russia