If you want some highly regarded programs that are recommended by the knowledgeable people on these forums, try Zone Alarm Home Edition for you firewall, and either Avast or AVG for the anti-virus. They have paid versions for commercial purposes or with more "features" or in some cases products are combined in a suite; however the free versions are very adequate for the average home user.

To check them out just Google the names. Or they can be download from http://download.com  or  http://majorgeeks.com among others.

Message Edited by dalem29 on 09-11-200604:43 PM

Trend Micro PC-cillin is very good too. 

Norton can slow your system down. Just make sure if you change your software, that you totally uninstall your current AV, which means doing more than performing an uninstall on it. Norton is hard to completely get rid of and it can cause problems if you have some of it still on your system.  You can find a lot of sites online on how to do this by googling 'completely uninstalling norton.'