I will soon have my new box loaded with Vista Home Premium. No doubt Avast Home Edition is my preferred AV but regarding firewall I am not sure whether I should keep Vista’s default firewall or go in for Comodo. I have heard Bill has improved inbuilt firewall in Vista.
Hello,
I would personally recommand the comodo firewall as it is the best in the market, yes the rumors are true Bill has improve its firewall now on a scale from 0 being nothing to 10 being excelent(comodo) The vista firewall now stands proudly at 1. It’s your choice but for the same price you might as well get the best of out of the two 
Al968
Is Comodo Vista compatible in the current release version, I though not.
You need to enable outbound protection in the Vista firewall as it is disabled by default and then it is a bit of a nightmare to configure by all accounts, but relief is at hand. Vista Firewall Control, check out this topic for some user friendly help for the Vista Firewall, Outbound protection, http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=30234.0
As for al968’s ranking I would have though it got more 1 than based only on inbound protection, if it is anything like XP’s it is very good at stealthing your system. Not that I would entertain any of the Windows firewalls.
Thank you for your reply. Yes Comodo is not yet compatible with Bill’s Vista. How does McAfee firewall (I know it is not free) compare with Comodo? I have opportunity to use McAfee.
Well I have no knowledge of McAfee’s firewall but I don’t know if that is part of a suite (with AV that you want to avoid) or stand alone firewall. There is also the PC Tools firewall which is Vista compatible and some forum members are using, though there are some that say it isn’t as good as comodo, this leak test report tends to support that.
See http://www.matousec.com/projects/windows-personal-firewall-analysis/leak-tests-results.php .
The latest Comodo 3 Beta is Vista compatible
Al968
I’m a little averse to using a beta product for a security application like a firewall on a non-test machine so I certainly wouldn’t recommend that as a choice on a new production system, but user choice.
The beta is compatible. Besides it’s beta, it’s stable (not crashing).
Other non-beta firewall compatible with Vista and free is PCTools firewall.
You can also use the Vista Firewall Control.
Find more information here:
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=30590.0
It is part of the suite and I guess I have option to choose what I want to install but I have never done that before so I am not sure.
My concern was if it is part of McAfee Internet security suite then it comes with a resident AV and this can conflict with avast.
If you have the AV element also installed you should disable it (still might have virtual device drivers running) and preferably uninstall that element if possible. If not you may need to uninstall the suite completely, reboot and then do a custom install and don’t select the AV element in the install.