My main beef with OE is it's handling (or not) of larger mailboxes, and it's utterly woeful backup and disaster recovery issues.
Backup of OE is very simple, just backup the *.dbx files. OK, you have to find and backup the address book separately, as it's the "Windows address book"
, but otherwise it's a doddle.
I have never had a problem in 10 years with restoring OE folders back from copies. Just import them into the new or existing identity.
As for large mailboxes - well as long as you keep the inbox and sent items folders below a GB (including subfolders), you are fine. My total is currently 2.4 GB across 89 folders without any problems, but both Sent Items and Inbox are only a few MB each.
is outlook 2010 really ok for home use (including reading from web clients )
I use the full Outlook 2007 at work, and find the functionality very useful indeed - I couldn't function without calendar and tasks - but I simply don't need that at home. But everyone's needs, likes and preferences are different, so make up your own mind.
I'm not sure what you mean by "reading from web clients", but there's no problem in pulling down your internet mail into Outlook - or any other POP3 / IMAP client for that matter.
If you are thinking of Outlook Web Access, that's a different concept altogether - normally for viewing your corporate email via a web browser.
There seem to be some quite strong views here about Windows Firewall versus 3rd party firewalls, and I'm not really going to comment further than to just say don't run more than one! Personally I think it is more important to have good AV and not to run as Administrator unless you actually need to.
SD