Hi,
Until recently I was using Avira Premium and have removed it after some problems, I am trialing Bitdefender Total Security 2012 and I am happy with it so far.
However, there is one Avira feature that I really miss. It is simply that I had the ability to require the firewall ask whenever an application (or applications) make an attempt to access the net.
Why do I miss this feature?
Well, having no idea of what to do, I set the firewall to ask about every (existing and new) net access attempt. Then, whenever firewall access was attempted I received a popup box with the details of what is trying to access the net and I was given the option to Permanently Allow, Allowed Once, Permanently Deny and Deny Once.
I allowed all the usual stuff and denied some. However, what was a surprise was how much of my desktops software was regularly going online without my knowledge. What was more surprising was that only the advanced details provided by the popup enabled me to easily identify what was actually attempting to go online. E.g. MS Word would go online whenever a doc was opened but the info at the firewall access didn't readily identify it as MS Word. I mean looking at the following string, how many people would know what process will actually be occurring online, c:\program files\windows media player\wmpnetwk.exe. Yes it is Media Player, but what is wmpnetwk.exe and who knows what is it doing (and how many people know Media Player has more than one online process)! 
Simply, in Avira I could set the firewall to Allow, Deny or Ask permission for any or all attempts at firewall access which I used to identify and block net access I wasn't happy with.
I would like to do this in Bitdefender as well, is this possible? I can only find options to Allow or Deny access (and I am not skilled enough to figure out what those strings of letters in the "allowed" list actually are.
Regards....
