Dear people, I have been consistently having problems with my net connection and suspect that it's not my ISP. I am able to browse, do FTP downloads, ping www.google.com etc, but KGpg, YOU, Gaim etc simply freeze and timeout on me. I have asked my ISP whether they are disabling any ports. They said none except VoIP which I must ask to be enabled (for free). I wonder if it is the SuSE Firewall. I have enabled the firewall, but perhaps it is working overzealously? Back in Windows, ZoneAlarm used to popup a window for each application that wanted to access the net or act as a server, and when I said Allow all was fine and happy. Now I suspect SuSEFirewall is working and disabling access of apps to the net without asking me. Please tell me what to do? Doesn't SuSEFirewall ask the user like ZoneAlarm? I should, no? I would RT(fine)M but I am not able to use the help center as I requested for help back on Sep 03, 07:33 to which noone has given a solution. :( SuSE 9.3 on a Pentium 4 530 with KDE 3.42, 80 GB HDD, 512 MB RAM. -- (o- Penguin #395953 lives at http://samvit.org //\ subsisting on ancient Indian wisdom ... V_/_ and modern computing efficiency! :)