After my recent hardware and software upgrades, I found that ISA2000 server was very flaky under Windows 2003, sometimes causing the Computer Manager application to crash just by reviewing settings. Even with the latest service packs.

So I upgraded to ISA2004 (a free upgrade!). Yuk. M$ is turning what was a proxy cache into a firewall. Each new version since Proxy Server 2 has been more and more focused on being a firewall. (Good luck to the brave folk who trust M$ software enough to run it as a full blown firewall.) But I digress...

Anyway the firewall features were more of a hindrance to me as this set-up is already behind a firewall. The ISA firewall can't be turned off, you have to have an allow all rule if you want to disable firewalling but keep the caching features. It was also chewing resources. So I looked around for an alternative.

Long story short... I ended up using a Win32 port of Squid. It is way faster than ISA, is more configurable, uses less memory and its free.