Firewall settings can't be changed! Help! Group Policy?

[Ferrari692]

I am having a problem with my SP2 firewall. I am running XP Pro on this system and after installing SP2 I noticed that firewall was disabled. However the buttons to access the firewall are all grey and I cannot modify any settings. Apparetly the computer thinks that this has something to do with group policy settings but I have never messed with these settings before and I am not on an office network.

Any suggestions to how I can enable the firewall would be greatly appreciated.

 

[P0ldy]

Log on as Administrator and try it?

 

[casper114]

That should do the trick.

 

[Ferrari692]

I was logged on as administrator. It doesn't help. Could it possibly be a virus?

 

[nweaver]

could be services. Did you disable the ICS service? They are tied into the same service (at least they were preSP2, havn't checked since upgrade).

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Ferrari692
I was logged on as administrator. It doesn't help. Could it possibly be a virus?

It could possibly Many of the virus descriptions I read at Symantec's and McAfee/NAI's sites mention that the such-&-such virus will disable the Windows firewall (and also the Windows Security Center). Welcome to my botnet, said the spider to the fly...

Gave you some suggestions in your other thread over in Technical Support. FYI it's good to stick with one section of the Forum at a time and not cross-post if you can help it

 

[gaidin123]

Start->Run, type gpedit.msc
Navigate to Computer configuration/Administrative Templates/Network/Network Connections/Windows Firewall

Make sure everything there is labeled as "Not configured" especially the "Prohibit use of Internet Connection Firewall on your DNS domain network". This is what you enable in a domain to disable the windows firewall on all your domain workstations. And yes we use that setting because we have other firewalls already on the machine.

But really, if you have a ton of spyware/viruses take others' advice and start over from scratch...

Gaidin

 

[Phoenix86]

run rsop.exe to tell you what policies are running on the machine.