....see what programs and/or processes on your computer are accessing your internet connection?.
I recently upgraded the motherboard, CPU and RAM in this desktop and I've noticed that the internet connection has not only slowed down somewhat, but on the ZoneAlarm traffic indicator in my Windows tool bar, it shows that there is constant "polling" of the connection (as in the lowest bars of the In/Out indicator, are blinking more or less at 2Hz).
Even with Firefox closed down, this connection activity still continues.
I have done numerous spyware and virus scans but they have all come up clean.
Any help I could get with this problem would be most appreciated.
Cheers,
Mike.

First, start your computer in the safe mode with network support or selective startup with all programs unchecked. See if the problem still exist. If not, some program is causing the problem. Check that windows is up to date. One of the worst programs is the disk that the cable/phone co give you to connect to their systems. This disk is NOT needed to connect to the internet. All the settings can be manually set up but they will tell you to install the disk. They are usually full of spyware that your spyware remover will ignore. I have seen machines that were working great till the AT&T DSL disk was installed and they slowed to a crawl. Not only that they are very difficult if impossible to remove. Robert

Mike,
I would restore the Zone Alarm control panel and click on "Program Control". Then look for the green check-marked items and switch them to "?", to make it ask you if you want to allow access. You can always put them back. If no luck there, I guess i would check Task Mgr for applications and/or processes that don't look right. Finally, you can check the router log if you have one.
Good luck,
Joe

What is the nature of your connection? If you are on a hub, I think that ZoneAlarm will pick up other network traffic, since your network card does.

Easy and Free

http://www.devicelock.com/freeware.html

from the website:

"Active Ports - easy to use tool for Windows NT/2000/XP that enables you to monitor all open TCP and UDP ports on the local computer. Active Ports maps ports to the owning application so you can watch which process has opened which port. It also displays a local and remote IP address for each connection and allows you to terminate the owning process. Active Ports can help you to detect trojans and other malicious programs."

if you don't want to install anything- I like to install as little as possible
to keep registry and file bloat off my computer (uninstallers don't always remove everything...despite their misleading name)- open a dos shell and use netstat and start killing processes one by one.