CraigB
2
I cant offer much help with zonealarm other than there are a few people that do run it but i believe there are better free firewalls out there such as online armor and private firewall.
Avast gets along well with the windows firewall and no exclusions are necessary, avast also works with defender but most people here including myself have it disabled simply because its scanning and detection capabilities are far short of avast which make it rather obselete in its usefullness, malwarebytes is a far better program to run alongside avast.