From: "Antti Kurenniemi" 

First, software firewall is (IMO) mostly useful on a laptop which you might
need to connect to a network at an unknown location where there might not
even be a hardware firewall. Seconly, software firewall (a good one that
is, not the half-assed version in XP SP2) monitors outbound connections as
well, so if one computer gets an infection, then if that computer has a
software firewall it might protect you by not letting the
trojan/virus/whatever *out* of the infected machine.

Antti Kurenniemi

"Gary Britt"  wrote in message
news:4552a6a1$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> OK, so if you have a software firewall, I thought one of the advantages of
> having a software firewall was to keep virii and trojans from your side of
> the router/hardware firewall from getting on your machine.  But in order
> to have access, in a peer to peer situation at least to the other
> computers and their files you have to basically allow all TCP/UDP access
> on basically all ports from 0 to 1100 give or take a few.  If you don't
> you can't log connect to network drives and other network resources on
> other machines.  So how is the software firewall protecting you from
> trojans and virii on other computers on your side of the router/hardware
> firewall???
>
> Confused?
>
> Gary

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