Hi DavidR,
It is even worse, because of this a lot of users with Vista do not even think of installing a software firewall, because they have the "half" Windows fw, don't they? This is bad, also there are fw's that create problems running on vista, so that also make people decide to go surfing without one, making it even easier for some forms of malware to do what it pleases to do or do it unnoticed by the inbuilt Vista firewall. Again an extra minus for Microsoft where pro-active protection is concerned, and that is the only way to go now with all the online malware and scams, on the other hand I can see that the software giant finds itself between a rock and a hard place where the question of bundled software is concerned, let us wait for the new avast fw to come out, and hope it is quite easy to get it installed onto vista,
polonus