Unlike software solutions, Nvidia's Firewall is driver based. This means that it is loaded up at the same time Windows is. With a regular firewall, there is a small window where the system is vulnerable before the firewall application starts up. According to Nvidia, they are not looking to compete with the likes of ZoneAlarm, BlackICE, Norton etc. They plan on working with firewall companies to expose the hardware capabilities of the Nforce3 firewall. I imagine that the situation will not be unlike that of WinDVD and PowerDVD supporting hardware acceleration within their own applications for DVD decoding