> I don’t think the firewall adds anything significant to the startup time Think how long iptables takes to load, plus installing a couple of system hooks to d

> I don’t think the firewall adds anything significant to the startup time Think how long iptables takes to load, plus installing a couple of system hooks to detect unknown programs and a GUI window to warn about them. This stuff only takes a long time to load if you're loading in a huge framework and JIT at startup - startup times are very quick for C++ programs using Win32 API calls or WTL. I'd say anti-virus and anti-spyware are mostly treated as one these days (anti-malware) - with things like Microsoft Security Essentials, Norton Internet Security, etc. I use MSE and it sure as hell doesn't add 5 seconds to startup. It doesn't even add 1. But perhaps it's because I'm running a 'post-modern' machine with an SSD...