Remove or Purge Application Rule for uninstalled/deleted app?

Hi,

Just starting using Comodo 6 firewall, so please bear with me. I’m running it XP Pro (yes, still).

Once an application, for which a firewall Application Rule has been created, is uninstalled or deleted, should the associated rule be Removed or Purged?

Reason I ask is that I got a pop up today (can’t recall the exact wording now), but to the effect that some process apnstub.exe was requesting to connect to the internet with 127.0.0.1-TCP.

In my haste, thinking this to be some bone-fide in-loop system request (I’d had similar calls before when setting up access to a shared USB printer), I approved and saved it, which of course created an application rule.

Researching apnstub.exe further I learned that it is in fact an Ask.com component that gets planted in Document & Settings/User/Temp folder when a Ask.com tagged program is installed, despite choosing not to install the Ask.com tool bar and serves to report whether the tool bar is installed. Probably came along with a Java update today. Avast AV and Malwarebytes both seem to ignore it, but to my mind it constitutes spyware.

Anyhow, CCleaner clean-up seemed to get shot of it (I hope). Went back to the Comodo firewall settings and ‘Removed’ the associated rule. Was that the right thing to do or should I have ‘Purged’ it?

BTW - is there any way to selectively turn off the message box that pops up when the Firewall has ‘auto-updated’ (is it actually updating that frequently or just checking in?) - it’s not exactly a discrete little bubble (that’s my wife complaining).

Thanks.

Remove will give you control over the rule (as in, if you create the rule in error and the program still exists); Purge checks to see if all the entries are still valid (programs are still installed, etc.) and removes those that are no longer valid. Either one just deletes the rule from the database.

OK, thanks.