Can somebody throw some light on "Generic Process for Win32 Services", which pops up as a permittable process with Internet access in software firewalls. I'm currently contemplating switching from Norton Internet Security to Zone Alarm and I had desperate problems with that process in the Norton product.

The default settings in the firewall for "Generic Process ....." are usually 'all channels permitted' but, certainly in Win2K, as soon as you then try to access the Internet, an "svchost.exe" error is generated and reported onscreen. The program is then terminated. If you manually configure the process to be non-permitted and you then access the Internet, a number of viruses are let in (usually Trojans). Blocking the process also seems to affect the downloading of files from certain websites.

This was a major problem in Norton and could be solved only by complete non-permitting of the process from the very start. If once the svchost error is flagged, you've little option but to re-format.

Does anyone have any experience of this, especially with Zone Alarm, and can suggest a way of avoiding the problem whilst still allowing standard Internet access? Is this a problem that's unique to Win2K, or just unique to the Norton firewall?

According to this, it is part of Universal Plug and Play Service. The article is for XP though, but perhaps 2000 have this same service?

Then in this forum someone says that it is related to DNS service.

Computing.Net - Subject: Generic Host Process for Win32 Services

Description of Svchost.exe in Windows 2000