Windows XP firewall refusing to start.

[CougTek]

A rather clueless she-customer arrived yesterday with a computer infested with spywares and a broken WinXP firewall. She had a good anti-virus program (Avast), so no virus was present on her system. After using three different spyware-removal tools under safe mode, I'm fairly confident that the system is now clean. But the firewall refuses to start anyway.

Else than a Windows-repair, how can you heal WinXP's integrated firewall? Just trying to activate it yields no result. I'm still far from being as familiar with WinXP as I am with Win2K so I don't know where to look at to fix this issue. I hope Google or one of you will have an answer.

 

[CougTek]

Also, Zone Alarm is too complicated to be considered an alternative for this intellectually-challenged customer.

And I would rather not use the WinXP "back-in-time" tool since I have no idea since when the firewall is broken and that going back would mean bringing back a few evil softwares too.

 

[Sol]

You could just install a basic software firewall and configure it to block all incoming and allow all outgoing connections. It's not perfect and it's not very elegant but it's probably as good as the windows firewall was doing and it's nice and simple and with an up to date virus scanner it's not horribly insecure.

I suspect, however, that if the firewall is broken you'll probably find something else that is too (or you won't but the customer will in a few weeks). It's probably worth doing the reinstall anyway since you can't guarentee the customer won't have further, related, problems a week from now. Because if they do they will call you and you will be blamed...

 

[Jake the Dog]

What does the event log say? It shoudl detail a reason for failure to start.

Looking at XP-Pro, the firewall is depedant on two RPC services, Network Connections and WMI. Go to the Services Console, check the "Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)" list of dependance and see if they are running too. If they are, AND the firewall service is running then you may be able to find a conflict in the local computer policy howver this could take a while to find and resolve. If required services are running but broken then your'll ssoner have it fixed with a re-install anyway... At least then too you know it leaves your hands in a goon known working state.

 

[time]

... it leaves your hands in a goon known working state.

I've often felt that way about Windows ...

 

[Santilli]

Just installed PC Maclan NT on 2003. BLUE SCREEN.

No system recovery going back in time, and, even after deleting, still blue...
Had to go back to last safe combination, and delete from there, and I was OK.

S

 

[Jake the Dog]

... it leaves your hands in a goon known working state.

I've often felt that way about Windows ...

so true! (I wish I could claim to have meant that typo!)

 

[CougTek]

It was a typo? Sure made sense to me the way it was written.

A Windows repair did the trick. Thanks again for your replies.

 

[Pradeep]

Just installed PC Maclan NT on 2003. BLUE SCREEN.

No system recovery going back in time, and, even after deleting, still blue...
Had to go back to last safe combination, and delete from there, and I was OK.

S

Pretty sure Win 2003 isn't supported by Maclan. At least there's no mention of it on the CA site.

 

[Santilli]

Figured it might work, since it was NT based version I installed. NO.


S

 

[Bozo]

This is after the fact but; Win XP SP2 made a lot of changes to the firewall. Posibly just re-installing the SP would have fixed the problem.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Tea]

You can reinstall SP2? How do you do that?

 

[Bozo]

Download it from MS and install.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...be-3b8e-4f30-8245-9e368d3cdb5a&DisplayLang=en


Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Tea]

Just run theh install again over the top? Easy as that? Cool! Thanks Bozo.