i hate unplugging my ethernet cable everytime i play sof2 sp but its a necessary evil,,,
my zone alarm eats a whopping 12 to 20 percent of my sytem resources,,,and they say its an invisible little program with minimal footprint.
gota shut it off..
i followed a guys post ,a supposed computer tech discussing optimization for sof2, he obviously has no grasp on the problem,,,i have 94% resources free ,over 800 mb's of FREE memory after a clean boot(i have 1,023 mb's of rdramm,)1.7 pentium 4 ,and i have yet to see a firefight with over 30 fps.

the problem isnt a resource one! it cant be!
thanx guys 4 all the support and help!

Get Rid of Zone alarm.. It's lame...  You have a router and are hosting dhcp on the backend.  Your unpingable from the get go and you only forward to port 20100 in the event you host a sofII game.  Otherwise you do not need to port forward anything.  

Make changes to your system like setting of admin and system only on the C drive.  Do not host  ftp ot http or ts on your machine.  Send files through email.  no need for IM file transfers.. silly.

Apply your security patches. Run some PC sercurity diags.  Then go out there and test from security sites the access to your machine.. It is a fortress.  Follow nsa security protection on the machine.  add a auditting policy and turn off rogue services.  Then deny access to the machine via the local security policies.  

Do it right and you will free more resources then you can imagine.  Oh and by the way.. use win2k or XP or XP PRO.  If you are at home use XP HOME.  It comes with an ipsec policy on nsa standards out of the box almost..  Secure your pc from within and you will never need extra software.  

Get rid of that junk...  

Actually I built a server for this specific reason, my server handles all firewall controls and whatnot, as well as other misc. junk.  With the price of hardware now, especially if you have an old computer sitting around collecting dust, you can built a server for the price of a case if you don't have one sitting around.  I think my Cel 400a server cost me $34cdn to built.

Even if you are running a server with win2k or XP, please be sure to use the firewall router for port forwarding.. A hardware router is always better then the router funtionality of port forwarding found in win2k or XP.  

I also have a server here in my home, but this one cost 36,000 US dollars. Heh he..  Nice to see people are starting to build servers at home.  Make sure that you do not have any shares on your server.  Please always connect to the server at the C$ or D$.  Shares are vulnerabilities......

Do your thing!