Zone Alarm: do I need it?

Had brought up this question a couple of days ago, Here's some comments:Zone alarm & Symantec

ZoneAlarm provides bidirectional firewall support and asks a lot more questions when stuff is going on. If your antivirus is up to date I wouldn't worry too much about it but Zone Alarm is more feature-rich than the standard windows Firewall so if you are a "power user" you might want to consider it.

Most experts suggest that you use more then 1 anti virus as sometimes the one company does not detect al viruses. Also, ZomeAlarm has other functions, acting as a firewall.

ZoneAlarm is definitely a superior firewall that blocks all sorts of attacks that other firewalls let leak through.  It's not just about more power-user features (which I generally ignore), but also just better protection by default.  There is a grid of how several products (including ZoneAlarm and McAfee) hold up against various firewall leak tests.  Yes, I did find this info on the ZoneAlarm site (go to ZoneAlarm.com and click on independent tests), but the leak tests are independent third party leak tests that you can download and run yourself for free.  You can find similar info elsewhere - or check online reviews.

Bottom line - the ZoneAlarm firewall is generally and widely understood to be the best, it is free, so why risk using another firewall?