Vista firewall adding its own rules?

I have Vista home premium 32bit, and using the extended interface for
Vista's built-in firewall, with outbound control enabled.

Why do certain installations, especially and mostly some PC games, add
their own rules as allowed to the inbound ruleset of the firewall? Is
there a setting somewhere that i've missed, that would stop these from
happening?

Even if it isn't specifically dangerous activity for these games to
open ports, it still troubles me a whole lot. Supposedly a trojan can
also open itself a port, if these games can without ever asking me.

I don't have the limited user account setting enabled, i hated the
constant popups. Could that prevent these holes from being opened?


--
ccpower6

ccpower6 <> wrote in
news::

>
> I have Vista home premium 32bit, and using the extended interface for
> Vista's built-in firewall, with outbound control enabled.
>
> Why do certain installations, especially and mostly some PC games, add
> their own rules as allowed to the inbound ruleset of the firewall? Is
> there a setting somewhere that i've missed, that would stop these from
> happening?

Yes, you have the box checked that says 'block all incoming connections'.
It says right there that when you do that all exceptions will be blocked
silently. So even though they may add their own exception and doesn't
notify you it does nothing because they are all blocked by default. If you
uncheck that box you wil be notified when an app wants to add a rule. If
you want to play the paranoia game then I suggest you try a different 3rd
party firewall. Outpost or Commodo are good choices and free for the
paranoid. The problem I found with Vista's outbound protection is if
enabled it blocks it's own update service. Duh!