ZA Free is a joke. Ii is no better then Windows XP firewall and worse then Windows Vista/7 firewall. With Windows 7 Firewall set to Advanced I can score a 230/340 on the Comodo CLT test. But with ZA Free I get a 150/340. Also ZA is right down on the bottom of Matousec testing. ZA Pro is good but the free version is horrible. Windows Firewall Control is good but extremely chatty. Out bound protection is over rated and YES Windows Vista/7 Firewall does have outbound protect when properly configured. Even without using a guide to configure it you still get outbound control.
That is a very poor example, as much as I'm no fan of ZA it has to be better than the XP firewall as that has zero outbound protection.
When you use daft statements/examples like this it depreciates the rest of your comments, but then you compound it by saying outbound protection is over rated.
Any malware that manages to get past your defences will have free reign to connect to the internet to either download more of the same (we see plenty of cases like this in the viruses and worms forum), pass your personal data (sensitive or otherwise, user names, passwords, keylogger retrieved data, etc.) or open a backdoor to your computer, so outbound protection is essential.
Connections made from your system, if not challenged by the outbound protection of your firewall are allowed back in unchecked by your firewall.
We see lots of cases of the network shield blocking outbound connections to known malicious sites, so if is wasn't taking up the slack (or that site wasn't currently on the malicious sites list), if you didn't have a firewall with outbound protection security is breached.
Kind of blows a hole in the outbound protection being overrated, tell that to those experiencing this in the viruses and worms forum and see if they agree.
The one thing I do agree with is that ZA free is most certainly not the best free firewall.