I just recently finished a large PC cleaning effort and everything seemed good when I went to make sure my firewall settings were set to ON. The window has both options greyed out and the enabled setting is OFF. The wording at the top says "For your security, some settings are controlled by Group policy". I do not recall enabling any kind of group networking policy the would have influence on this but I am not sure. When I saw this, I hit the Restore Defaults button but the OFF setting did not change.

Please help!! This is a high traffic PC for my family and they are about to kill me since I have had it out of commission!

Thanks!!!

Which firewall are you using?
Cheers,
John

Sounds like XP firewall....

• FIREWALL OPTIONS GRAYED OUT:
Deploying Windows Firewall Settings With Group Policy
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...t/wfsp2wgp.mspx

When you use Group Policy to configure Windows Firewall, by default local administrators will be unable to change some elements of its configuration locally, using the Windows Firewall component in Control Panel. Some tabs and options in the Windows Firewall dialog box will be grayed out and unavailable, even for local administrators.

Troubleshooting the Windows XP SP2 Firewall in Your Home Network
http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesArticle/id-3016.html

If the options on the General, Exceptions, and Advanced tabs are grayed out, it means you are not logged on to the computer with a user account that has administrative permissions. A user with administrative permissions must log on to the computer to change the firewall options, or to change your user account to an administrative account.