If you got a bunch of alerts that said they were from D+ instead of the firewall, you can tell you installed the D+ HIPS. I used the Comodo CFP firewall/D+ for about a year, but finally gave up when they pretty much abandoned fixing and improving it to work on their AV Suite. Currently have Online Armor, which is has much better usability, plus some features that I find very useful as a mobile wifi user. Along with the outbound/antileak/HIPS protection. They are also much more responsive (like Avast!) to fixing your problems. I use logging, for example, to find problems, and having that controllable in the firewall is a big advantage. If you just want to run your firewall and Avast! and be reasonably well protected without a lot of interaction, the Vista firewall is a pretty good way to go. And the Vista firewall does have outbound protection, simplified if you want to play around with the Sphinx software to set it up.