I use sygate personal firewall on my XP machines (yes, it’s an older firewall) primarily because it is extremely good at giving you program/process level control over exactly what is accessing the internet.
any Vista compatible firewalls that have the same level of application control - and I don’t mean something that’s buried somewhere in the firewall that you can access through 3 submenus, something like SPF which is right in your face about it.
my entire point of wanting a firewall is to prevent windows from sending out information it believes “the internet” needs to know (or other random programs), but actually doesn’t.
using some system-integrated firewall doesn’t seem appropriate for my desires.
it’s not paranoia. you should see the amount of traffic that windows services generate that get blocked by my firewall. well, amount is probably wrong. frequency, however, is shocking.
I use Comodo (firewall only, not with AV) and like it. I am not a ‘geek’, but there’s enough technical stuff available in Comodo for even the most paranoid user, imho. Initially, the alerts as Comodo learns the system/services can be a pia, but once all the ‘services’ have been approved, its reassuring that chances are nothing will go outbound without your specific approval. I know it caught something on my computer awhile back, a little ~‘spyware’ thing that slipped through after I disabled AdBlock on a site (lesson learned!). Comodo also has a decent Forum for Tech Support issues should it be needed.
Me gusta Comodo. It’s one of the firewalls I’ve been playing with over the last 6 months or so. Ever since Bill Gates made his comments years ago (sorry for the lack of cite… I’m lazy right now) about wanting to wire the whole darned house to a single backbone, I hesitate to trust the built-in Windows firewalls in XP/Vista/7.
If you’re a tinkerer (sounds like you are) there are some cool ways to integrate Comodo with Snort (IDS/IPS). It’s security geek Romper Room.
