PC Tools can boast that they are providing useful and neat features in their personal firewall. Not only it can protect against intruders, but it can also monitor every network request by applications. It can also notify the user about applications that tries to inject or modify another application without the user's knowledge. The images below are examples where PC Tools Firewall Plus 7 alerted me on attempt by a Logitech program even if I only executed Firefox browser:
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The free firewall provides application logging of the firewall and network activity. Note that this will not work unless you modify the application rules to log the activity of every application:
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If you enable application logging, PC Tools Firewall Plus' history window will display the activities of Firefox or other programs:
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Without modifying the application rules, the history window in the firewall program will always be empty, even if you use the default setting to auto-refresh logging of network and firewall activities.
PC Tools personal firewall also includes a built-in updater and the ability to block all network connections 
on the computer that it is securing. It's a handy command that Symantec has removed in its Norton Internet Security's notification tray icon.
Tip: Change the default settings in the firewall program by unchecking the boxes for "Automatically allow known applications" and "Automatically allow applications with valid digital signatures." This will stop the firewall for auto-creating firewall rules for any program. Note that some programs have invalid or stolen digital signatures, and it's best to control yourself which applications you trust.
