Firewall causes hang at startup

Hello-

I just recently finished installing ESS 3.0 across my SBS2003 domain. I set the firewall up for Automatic mode with Sharing, with the hopes that this would be sufficient for the network. However, because Automatic mode doesn't allow uninitiated incoming connections, some of our software (namely UPS Worldship 200 doesn't work.

Given that, I set my own computer to Interactive mode with the intent of creating a ruleset that I could then export and apply to the computers that needed it. However, when I came in to work this morning I found that my computer was just sitting at the "Applying computer settings..." screen, and it stayed there for over 20 minutes before I rebooted.

As described in these posts, the computer ran fine if I disconnected the network cable and then only reconnected it after logging in. The only change that I had made to my computer since logging in previously was changing the firewall from Automatic to Interactive, so I changed it back to Automatic, did another reboot, and everything worked fine.

My guess is that Interactive mode is waiting for approval for some sort of network activity, which I can't give it when the computer is still booting. Is there something that I perhaps missed when I set up the rules?

For reference, I'm running ESS 3.0.672.0 on XP SP3 in an SBS2003 domain.

 

Without knowing the peculiarities of SBS2003, my guess is that ESS was trying to display the standard window to allow or deny the packet(s) but something prevented it. A similar thing happens with games which claim the whole of the graphics surface. Were you perhaps running on dual display or something?

Also examining the windows event log might be useful.

 

Indeed it was. Turns out that my old AV didn't do a very good job of removing itself and was interfering with RasMan. It was either fixing that or tweaking svchost's permissions (or both) that did it.

Thanks for the help.