As a side note, you may be wondering if it is a security risk that applications can add and remove applications from the exceptions list any user intervention, or perhaps you think that the bigger risk is that applications can disable the firewall altogether. To perform these feats, the application must have administrator privledges. If you have malicious code running in administrator mode on your system, the game is already over and the hacker has already won. The hacker’s ability to disable the firewall would merit little more than a footnote.
What it fails to mention is many millions of Windows XP installations are run with administrator privileges on the users regular account, I practically ROFL’d lol.