Windows Firewall is Not Working!?

Question

Can anbody tell me please, why my windows firewall is not working, and its disabled somehow. When i go to Windows Security Centre, the firewall is turned off, when i go to windows firewall to enable it or to turn it on, nothing is working, i mean everything there is disabled somehow, there is message on the top of the page says "For your security, some settings are controlled by Group Policy" what is group policy, can i disable it, or is there anyway i can trun on my windows firewall from there, because its controlled from there (Group Policy), so how can i go about it?
Thanks, i really appreciate your helpe, any easy instruction!

Answer 1

Virus's are insiduous little things & a lot of people don't realize that they can alter all sorts of setting on your PC including disabling ADMIN privileges. I had one that even disabled my start menu as well as locking me out of the control panel.



I would strongly advise a different firewall, I use the full ZoneAlarm suite personally (firewall, AV, Antispyware, Pop up blocker etc..) as well as other security software, when you've sorted the problem out.



Now it depends how proficient you are with Windows as to what avenue to take here. If your not that knowledgeable then try doing a system restore to when everything was fine. THEN get a better firewall and as much security as you can.



If your pretty confident then restart windows, F8 into safe mode, run AV's etc and hopefully that will cure it.



If your ultra confident then start checking your services, registry etc.. I DO NOT ADVISE MESSING WITH ANY OF THESE IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOUR DOING!



Good Luck!

Answer 2

Are you on a work computer? Group Policy is usually set by a Domain administrator to change settings on tens..hundreds or thousands of pcs at a time rather than going to each one and manually doing it.



If it is at work, dont worry, it's their problem...



If not at work, go to start, run (or press windows key +R together) and type gpedit.msc to get the group policy console, somewhere deep in there could be a policy set to disable the firewall - but on a standard workstation there are no policies set by default.

Answer 3

I doubt its a virus. There's no such policy which will make your PC more vulnerable. Do a virus and spyware scan. Then get Zone Alarm firewall....some third party firewalls turn off windows firewall

Answer 4

Zone alarm is much better, just download it for free and disable windows firewall (it's blocked over 13000 attempts on my PC and i dont download anything dodgy!)

Answer 5

If you have a third party Firewall, it will turn off MS firewall.

Download a decent Firewall, do not rely on MS's own one.

Answer 6

just leave windows firewall and get an anti-virus with a firewall or

free firewall like zone alarm

http://www.zonealarm.com/store/content/company/products/znalm/freeDownload.jsp

Answer 7

i think it means your antivirus software is using their firwalls instead of windows