Have you tried removing ZoneAlarm properly and then installed Comodo? It could be that a bad uninstall caused the problems as Firewalls often don't play nicely together.

i admit that i only unistalled zone alarm in the usual manner before installing comodo. this clearly didn't remove all the files it should have done otherwise i wouldn't have had a problem when reinstalling zone alarm. so, i can accept this might be why the comodo firewall acted a bit odd with me.

i'd give comodo another try but i found the number of prompts it kept popping up was far too annoying - stupid things like maxthon is trying to connect to the internet using parent application gom player. almost anything that connected to the net would say it was using a different parent application to do so - i'm sure some things were correct but others were gibberish - and if they weren't gibberish then i really don't want to know. no doubt this is makes for a more secure system but i haven't the patience to click a prompt pretty much every time something connects - i'm more used to allowing a program through the firewall and then letting that be remembered for me.

okay, it would only ask once for each specific combination of app and parent app but the number of parent apps it 'thought' were being used just made it ridiculous. i shan't try to describe the situation further as i can well imagine i'm the only person that had this problem.

anyway, my main reason for using comodo was for assigning specific port numbers - which i quickly realised after installing it that i really don't need to use (port numbers were important to me about 3 years ago).

currently, zone alarm allows me to allow an app through the firewall - and then forget about it. i really don't care what 'parent' application is being used to trigger it.

is my system an less safe because of it? i'm not worried, i'm just glad not to have to keep clicking on extra dumb prompts.

this isn't to say that wouldn't try comodo again - i'll just wait until i have a good reason for it.

I wish I could find a decent lightweight (read: non-system-or-network-affecting) firewall whose sole purpose was to block malicious outbound connections. I have no need for software filtering of in-bound data since my router does that without any overhead, but I wouldn't mind being able to enable outbound protection in a really lightweight client when working on my PC, as a safeguard against, for instance, making a bad software installation decision and having unauthorized sensitive data get sent out, which my router of course would care less about.

Has anyone heard of or used something like this? Maybe there's a really lightweight firewall that I can just disable inbound filtering on, but I've never used one that I've found to be suited for such a purpose.