Never trusted the sandbox functionality. I've been installing Comodo CIS with only the firewall and antivirus, sandboxing disabled, HIPS on low settings on. Any notable exploits left that would bypass that?
I basically just use it for the Firewall and HIPS too, because I cannot find another free firewall solution (that isn't Windows firewall) that is any good, and I cannot find any other example of an HIPS that is as easy to set up and run as the Comodo one.
That said, I'm getting seriously tired of their shadyness/incompetence recently.
What's wrong with Windows firewall/defender/anti-virus/whatever it's called these days? It's free, it doesn't try to market itself to you, it doesn't smell like malware, and it doesn't seem to show up in these regular sweeps of disastrous security bugs in the third-party solutions.
Windows Firewall has the annoying habit of letting stuff work until one day it just starts doing its job and doesn't. Typically this is through user prompts that either get spacebar'd away due to focus stealing* or blocked because the user doesn't know what it's asking about.
It's a mess working out what it's doing, fixing it and explaining to the user why their perfectly working system just broke. It could really use some organization tools like the Task Scheduler.
*I thought Microsoft promised at one point around the lead up to Windows 7 that they were going to address their stealing focus issues.