When I open Houdini help for the first time (well, after a reinstall) my firewall - Trend Micro Internet Security 2007 - shows a warning that says something like “hdox has requested enhanced capabilities, granting those could be unsafe” Is that a false alarm?

Yes.

Thanks, Edward.

Just in case anyone is wondering why:

Houdini's help docs support user comments, which are stored on sidefx.com. If you block access to sidefx.com you'll only miss out on the help comments at the bottom of help pages.

Thanks for the clarification.

hi, Ive recently notice this as well in H8.
However, it only seems to happen for
some users. Even when prefs are the
same. how do you disable this? What
should i look for?

hmm, deleting ~.hbrowser and ~.mozilla seemed to fix the problem.