If it's ICSA certified, it's good enough for me...
[url]http://www.icsalabs.com/html/communities/pcfirewalls/cert_prods.shtml[/url]
That covers:
Sygate Personal Firewall Pro
Norton Personal Firewall 2002
Tiny Personal Firewall
I used Tiny for a while, but it was causing lockups on bootup, so I switched. I've heard nothing but good things about it from others, just personally had some issues with my machine.
You can also get a hardware firewall, if you want to offload the work from your machine onto something that's designed specifically as a firewall. For that, check out:
[url]http://www.firewallguide.com/hardware.htm[/url]
If I could pick any hardware firewall, I'd buy the Netgear FR314. It has stateful packet inspection, yet costs far less than most other stateful packet inspection routers. Most cheap consumer routers just use NAT to protect you.
For more on NAT vs SPI see:
[url]http://www.homenethelp.com/router-guide/features-firewall.asp[/url]
That being said, some people run both hardware AND software firewalls, just to be extra safe. Of course, some people wear tinfoil hats to keep out the orbital mind control lasers, so your preferred protection level may vary.
Viper Out