I can only speak for the firewall I run (zonealarm free). The License Manager, AutoCAD and several other related programs each had seperate entries. Although these were marked as "Trusted", it wasn't allowing these programs unfettered Inward or Outward access to my system or to the Internet in general. I had to manually select "allow" or "deny" as it defaulted to "ask" for each of the 4 options (System out, Internet out, System in and Internet in). The problem was I wasn't getting asked. Found out later I could have run a diagnostic tool that would have automated it and solved the not "asking" popups.