Hi empireapparel,

I think what nihil said about wild traffic on the net is the issue. You will now see a fair amount of it, and you'd be waisting quite a bit of time trying to track all of it down, especially in light of all the compromised hosts with "network aware" bots on them. This is the nature of having a firewall installed that blocks and logs all this traffic. Also, I have come to understand that when you access a website, it will often try to initiate a connection on a different port. Some of this is for functionality, other times, who knows. Firewalls are generally designed to block unsolicited traffic, and when you see this in your logs, your firewall is doing its job. In addition, there will also be a fair amount of ICMP traffic, such as "ping". This could be from your service provider or somebody(thing) scanning.
"Ping" is generally a tool to test connectivity, but can be used for malicious purposes.

What is great about this Forum and you being here, is that you are learning about TCP/IP, the protocol that is used on the Internet to send and receive data. I am certainly learning here. Keep reading and searching for relevant posts.

I have calmed down a bit. It is good to have a sense of paranoia, but it has to have perspective. You'll get that here. So, don't ignore your logs, play with them, use 'tracert' and 'ping' from the "command line" to start with. Get to know what TCP/IP is all about. There is tons of info on the net. Before you know it, you'll unleash the real power of your "poor little system", LOL.
Last but not least, your firewall will do what you tell it to(hopefully). So if you download binary indiscriminately, you'll get what you ask for. Some software has "call home" functionality built into it, at times for good, at times for worse. McAfee will block outgoing traffic as you tell it to, warn you of it, but you'll have to understand what is warranted and what is not. That is often the part of the learning experience, understanding the traffic. I still have a hard time sorting it all out, but am getting better at recognizing it.
Thoughts of a newb...