Recently one of our reader Sarfaraj Khan emailed us his problem that he is unable to turn on windows firewall. He cannot enable or disable the windows firewall as the options of turning on and off of the firewall were grayed out as shown in the image below (you can click to zoom).

This type of problem occurs when your computer has been infected by some virus which you may have removed from your computer but some infections caused by the virus remains.

Let’s find out how can you resolve this problem of firewall turn on off options disabled

Fix:

The viruses normally create these registry entries which disable and grey out the turn on off controls in windows firewall.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall\DomainProfile]
"EnableFirewall"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall\StandardProfile]
"EnableFirewall"=dword:00000000

>> If values of the above keys is set to 0, it will disable and it grays out the firewall controls so it cannot be changed.

>> If the value of the above keys is set to 1, it will enable it and grays out the firewall controls so it cannot be changed.

So, in order to fix the problem you would need to delete these registry keys written above and restart you computer to see the effect.

The step by step procedure to enable the disabled options of firewall are as follows

For Windows XP Home Edition and Professional Edition

1. Open Start Menu >> Run, type regedit and press Enter key

2. Navigate To the following path

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Policies \ Microsoft \ WindowsFirewall

3. Make sure to export and backup WindowsFirewall key and close registry

You can also control this through gpedit.msc in Windows XP Professional

1. Open Start Menu >> Run, type gpedit.msc and press Enter key

2. Navigate to the following path

Computer Configuration >> Administrative Templates >> Network >> Network Connections >> Windows Firewall >> Standard Profile

3. Close Group Policy Editor

4. That’s it done, you may need to restart your computer

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