do i need outbound protection if i'm only interested in safeguarding my own pc?
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In my humble opinion yes. Its all well and fine to simply assume you have not been hacked, a guarantee no firewall can make, but unless you have the easily accessible log files detailing your outbound connection, all you are is dumb, fat, ignorant, clueless, and happy.
Even if I get hacked with my two way firewall, I have the log files to tell me what is going out, and while I spend the various joyless hours tracking down the source and the cure in the event skulduggery is suspected, its still only going to take moments to totally block that outbound connection meanwhile.
Its sorta like robbing a bank, robbing the bank is just half the job, getting the money and you out is the other half.
And a one way firewall does a half assed job.
In MHO, the windows XP SP2 has only one virtue, its better than nothing at all. Given the fact that a plethora of freeware and commercial firewalls are much much better, its a no brainer.