Hi hUstle,

If you want the Norton firewall to provide warnings and permit you to make the "allow/deny" decisions, you can certainly do that, at least for outbound traffic, by turning off Automatic Program Control and enabling Advanced Events Monitoring.  The firewall will block everything until you decide to allow it.  You will be alerted every time a program, such as Remote Assistance, tries to connect out or is "attempting to access the Internet using one or more unrecognized modules" or "attempting to activate a controlled COM object."  You will get to do the research and decide if it should be permitted or denied.  Smart firewalls were developed to spare users, especially novices who are prone to make exactly the wrong choices, from having to go through all this.  If you are serious about wanting to go back to this method, I would encourage you to try running the firewall in AEM mode for awhile.