The good news is that there’s a small tweak you can make to your Windows network connections to make it more difficult for a booter to dislodge you.

1. Go to Control Panel
2. Open Network and Internet connections
3. Click on Network Connections
4. Right click on whatever connection you’re using and scroll down to Properties
5. Click on the Advanced tab and turn on the connection firewall

In addition to Y!mlite, YTK is also an excellent program, though it costs $16 for the pro version. YTK has a deny buddy feature for the newest booting rage of flooding your IM’s with deny requests.

Kaspersky has an internet security suite that’s highly effective in stopping chat booters. A registered version will run you about $70 for one year.

If you don’t already have one, look into getting a wireless router with a built-in firewall. This will also help greatly in keeping your system free of trojans and other nasties that booters sometimes piggyback on their codes.

One more thing. Sana Security has a nifty little program called Safe Connect which acts like a secondary firewall to whatever router connection you have. I’m not sure if it works with modems, but it’s worth a try.