Well my take on it is that Zombies were once humans and therefore, they don't have super human strength. The body will start to decompose no matter what. So every time the zombie exerts effort or uses the remaining muscles it will weaken, because the muscle tissue has no way of regenerating without working organs carrying nutrition and whatnot. So after awhile, the zombies would get weak and slow and basically would only be crawling.
They would start fast, but because of the muscle decomposition they would end up on the ground like an infant who can't walk.... I believe that you could wait them out if you could survive the first year or two.
They probably wouldn't even make noise, because if all the organs cease to function then the lungs wouldn't need to pull in air, so they would be like ninjas.
You would probably be able to smell their rotting corpse before they actually got to you, I can smell a rotting deer on the road half a mile before I reach it....
If they got a fresh meal they would gorge themselves, most of them would have their stomach burst and eventually it would burst out of them, which would decrease the stability of the zombie thus probably rendering them a pile of wriggling mush n guts.
Best defense? Setting up trip wires and bear traps around your camp, LOTS of them. they trip on the wire, then they crawl and get caught in the bear traps. I've often thought of making a movie "Dumb of the Dead"