There is some good stuff here, but I am not a fan of Zone Alarm. Personally, I keep the firewall on a separate box on the peripery of my home network. Windows has way too many hooks that can be hacked and by having the firewall within windows, you run some risks. I use a netscreen firewall. It goes through the cable modem and hits the Netscreen first. My Windows OS can plug along fat dumb and happy without having to filter packets from the web. The netscreen is pricey, but I got mine free. There are other firewall routers that are also quite good, if they are set up right.
For file management and a good use interface, RedHat Linux is quite good. But you have to be willing to invest some time in it to make it work the way you want. The OS is much more robust and depending on the application, about 75% faster.