It has been at least a year since trying out various software firewalls 
including Zone Alarm and Commodo. Although my take on them could be 
somewhat out of date, I found none of them to be user friendly as an 
outgoing firewall. There was only one (neither of these two) that I 
would recommend against. That program gave the appearance of a user 
friendly (primarily hands free) outgoing firewall, but when I dug into 
it, I found it was doing no more than Windows as an outgoing firewall.

It appears from your comments that Zone Alarm is trying to be user 
friendly with its outgoing firewall, but has ignored any input from 
users. My experience required users to make decisions on allowing or not 
allowing outgoing information. The problem was that most inquiries were 
cryptic and unintelligible to lay people and did not include any 
recommendation so an informed decision was rarely possible. It seems 
that to counteract uninformed user input, Zone Alarm now simply bypasses 
the user which would not be too bad if the user was provided an informed 
opportunity to opt out of certain allowed connections.

Zone Alarm is a respected product and I do not believe they would 
knowingly allow any outgoing communication that could be harmful 
although you might have personally blocked one or more of them. Based on 
your comments, I am considering giving Zone Alarm another try. If I find 
that they are allowing certain connections that I find objectionable, I 
can always try to find a way to disallow them or uninstall Zone Alarm.

Tom
 

g.Computer9f wrote:
> I just updated ZA which I have used for years. But I'm not happy. Suddenly there are a huge number of Microsoft program-lets that are now in my programs access list - things I KNOW I never said "yes" to. 
>
> When I try to remove them from the list, so I can try to find out what they are by when they seek access, I'm told if I remove them from the list (which should do nothing except make them ask permission) that dire things could happen. 
>
> If I can't get my old version reinstalled, I may switch to Commodo. Any opinions about the relative merits of these two firewalls? 
>
> --AnnaSummers
>
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