I am looking for a good reliable firewall that can provide outbound protection for Windows XP.
I am not sure, but I thought a while ago I heard about a program that could provide outbound protection for the Windows Firewall.
If anyone knows about this, I’d appreciate your input
You can use the free Comodo firewall and it will do an excellent job of providing both incoming and outgoing protection. If you want just the Firewall, download the correct installer and during installation you will be given three configuration options. The first one will install just the basic Firewall with no HIPS or sandboxing. The other two options will give you the other things in varying degrees with the last one giving you everything except Comodo’s AV. I am using the first installation option and it works extremely well as a 2-way firewall. It has a stealth ports wizard as well but I never even had to use it, the default setup works fine for me and alerts to all connection attempts except outgoing ones by well known safe and trusted applications. Anything new or unknown will produce an alert for any type of connection attempt. I like it that way but you can set it up to trust nothing and ask for permission for everything. I tried the other free Firewalls like PCTools, Online Armor, Zone Alarm, and Outpost but the only one that works for me without problems is Comodo.
I recommend ZoneAlarm, it’s the only one that works for me without problems.
Maybe the program you heard about was an outbound control for the Vista firewall, which has outbound capability. To my knowledge, no such program exists in regard to the XP firewall.
There are many two way firewalls available. I’ve tried out a few, and ended up with using the XP firewall (as part of a layered protection strategy.)
Firewalls include ZoneAlarm, Outpost, OnlineArmour, Comodo, and several others, both rules and applications- based. It pays to have a bit of knowledge to set up a rules-based firewall. (Kerio would be an example. Very competent if properly set up.)
IMO, I don’t think we can trust Zonealarm anymore. Have you read this thread? Checkpoint used a scare tactic to try to get users of the free firewall to upgrade (similar to that of a Fake AV). And they’re censoring mentioned competititor’s product names on the forum…
You can use PC Tools firewall+. It has low memory consumption and very easy to use. Best of all, it’s free. 
I trust ZoneAlarm.
It’s Comodo that can’t be trusted!
Do you want actual outbound protection or outbound notification?
Dare I mention ‘avast! Internet Security’. :o ;D
While Comodo has it’s faults, they have never done anything that could even remotely be called wrong when you have all the information. The stuff that ZA pulled is disgraceful.
What Comodo has done doesn’t compare to what ZA has done. I don’t want to get into it!
Besides, I don’t think ZA did anything wrong! ZA only sent the pop up to ZA Free users,
I think they felt if the people were using ZA’s free fw, they were probably using a free a/v, too.
With the exception of avast! 5, and maybe Avira, free a/v’s may not be sufficient protection.
Therefore the pop up warning. I’m willing to give ZA the benefit of the doubt.
With all the flack ZA got over that pop up, I don’t thing there will be another one! :
What Comodo did was bad! Please don’t turn this into another Comodo thread!!!
Review: http://download.cnet.com/ZoneAlarm-Free-Firewall/3000-10435_4-10039884.html
Thanks for the input. Appreciate it.
So now I’m not sure whether to use Comodo. Is it safe to use?
How is PC Tools firewall? Does it let you monitor where outbound stuff is going and block it?
What about firewalls that come with the actual router?
Comodo is totally safe. There was some ridiculous nonsense spread a while back that they were selling certificates to malware authors and it was implied that it was done knowlingly. The facts are that ALL certificate issuers had done the same thing and Comodo was the only one who immediately revoked theirs as soon as it was found out that the authors were writing malware (Rogue AV stuff). It certainly was not done knowingly at all. What Zone Alarm did was send an essentially false positive detection to their free version users in an attempt to get them to buy the full version. That’s disgraceful to say the least.
You can follow what I posted originally about the Comodo Firewall and you will have excellent protection and it will be totally safe. Zone Alarm, aside from their shameful recent behavior, is bloated and much harder to configure if all you want is control over connections.
Router firewalls lack outbound protection.
+1
Bashing a serious and good product won’t make anyone wiser.