Privatefirewall freezes Win7x64.SP1 after the needed reboot

Software:
Windows 7, 64-bit, SP1, + latest updates from 'Windows Update'

Hardware:
- HP Pavilion dv7-6b76eo notebook PC
- Intel core i7 2670QM
- 8gm ddr3 RAM, Samsung
- Upgraded to Samsung 850 Pro SSD 256gb where OS is installed
-Have blocked the discrete AMD GPU in BIOS so only running with the on-board Intel GPU

Issue:
Installed the Private firewall and it causes my Win7 to freeze immediately after the reboot. Luckily I have a multiboot setup with Win10 installed on a separate partition. Others are having similar issues with the firewall, too, as I've read. So I remedied things from within Win10 by deleting the firewall folder in C:\Prog.Files in the Win7 partition. Then back to Win7, uninstalled Avast, stopped Windows Firewall, cleaned registry and temp files and everything with CCleaner and YourUninstaller, rebooted 19 times and once that was done I tried to install the Private firewall again, but in vain, same issue again & again... tried a couple of times.

I get no error code, nothing. Just my screen freezes. The freeze happens after I install the firewall and then of course I have to reboot. So I reboot and when I enter my user account password and enter Windows, my start-up items start loading (as usual) and at that moment a window of 'Privatefirewall' appears in the middle of my screen, but the window does not respond. It's frozen as well. So it stays like that for a bit and then my whole system freezes. Again and again. Cleaned everything I could think of, installed it again and same issue happened.

And prior to the following few attempts to install the firewall I had disabled both Windows Defender and Windows Firewall in Services.msc. Then rebooted and then tried to install again the Privatefirewall. No luck.

As mentioned, I have a multi-boot setup and my ssd is partitioned so that on 2 separate partitions I have Win7x64 and Win10x64. So, as I said, the problem with freezing happens on my Win7x64, but right now I managed to successfully install Privatefirewall on my Win10x64. No problems over there at all.

Help pls! This firewall was recommended to me as the best out there. The best and only one allowing proper control, which is what I need.

 

Can't help you I'm afraid – my experience is similar to yours.

I'm running Windows 10 as a Virtualbox VM and have had no problems at all with PFW – despite installing\re-installing PFW several times. Yet when I did a 'clean' install of Windows 10 recently (twice) – on each occasion, Windows 10 would hang spectacularly when installing PFW (a blank UI would appear – then zippo)

Some time ago, I installed PFW in Windows 7 (64 bit) – had no problems installing - however once I started launching programs – Windows 7 would hang! There was no consistency with how many programs I launched, nor the particular program, so, never did discover the why.

That's the problem with abandonware – if it works, fine, but when problems occur you are, more or less, on your own.

 

Thank you for the reply! Damn ... why would they abandon it ... that sucks ... such a sweet firewall.

Anyone else, please?

 

Can't we try to make the firewall a virtual app with this http://www.cameyo.com/ or portable with this http://portableapps.com/ ... would that work?

 

Figured out what was causing PF to freeze in Win7. I had deliberately uninstalled a certain Win update, which meant I had be rolled back to an older IE, IE9. So i thought that might be it. Reinstall that update. Installed latest IE11 as well as from Win Upd. And that then allowed me to install PF successfully. The only problem after that was, as many others have complained, that as the firewall started seemingly working properly it would now and then pop up with a notification that whatever service/process is using the net. That then would AGAIN cause a system freeze. At that point I gave up I removed the firewall. It seems like a really sweet firewall, but apparently development on it has stopped long ago and it is now abandoned. That might also be the reason for the problems. For now I said **** it and just enabled the default Win Firewall. Would really be nice if we had a simple app for Windows, such as the Android app AFWall+ ... nice, SIMPLE, and functioning. Nothing more, nothing less. A lot/if not all of the firewalls for Windows are in a way (but maybe it's needed) uselessly complex and God knows if they work

 

The freeze is perfectly normal with PFW as it performs some form of scan of the entire computer.The scan will finish eventually.I have not used this firewall for quite a while but i experienced the same thing.

 

How is the freeze perfectly normal when I clearly explained 2 very distinct scenarios? One where the freeze occurs ALWAYS and one where it does not.

1. Long ago I had uninstalled Win update KB2670838 which also uninstalled IE11 and that then reverted me to IE9. The reason I had done that is because I wanted to use Resource Monitor and without uninstalling that update it is impossible to use it. So anyway, the said KB update was uninstall, and subsequently I was reverted back to IE9. It was at that point when I FIRST tried to install PFW and every time it froze my system after the 1st mandatory reboot as well as after every following update after that.

2. I then decided to test and to install back the said KB update, then from Win Update I also installed the latest IE ... IE11, rebooted and then installed PFW and THAT time, after the reboot no issue occurred. I don't see how this is PERFECTLY normal... In one scenario it happens and in the other it does not. I don't think in the first scenario the freeze or scan, as u called it, would finish at any point and the system would become responsive again. If it were a scan it would make sense that only the PFW window itself is not responding, but as I said ... it was a complete SYSTEM FREEZE. Everything blocked.

Furthermore, as I said in my prev. post, once I managed to finally get PFW to work on Win7 it then started doing other things which also cause a system freeze. As many others have complained, as the firewall started seemingly working properly it would now and then pop up with a notification that whatever service/process is using the net. Some of those pop-up were ok, but some froze my system again. When I say froze I mean froze the WHOLE SYSTEM, not only the PFW window becoming non-responsive. The whole system frozen. Cannot do anything with it.

Anyway, thank you for the reply! It's appreciated. I'd really like to get to the bottom of this once and for all ... sadly I see that PFW is not longer being developed ...

 

@The Red Moon the freeze (or hang, I should say, cos it is a hang, not a freeze) that you're talking about is something else and I just experienced it now. How/why did I experience it? Cos I did one LAST test in a desperate attempt to figure out this firewall and install it somehow. Luckily it seemed to work. What I did is that I installed PFW .. but this time without disabling nothing prior to installing it (don't think that's the reason for success but just saying). Meaning that my Avast was installed, Win Firewall was on and that notorious KB update was uninstalled. So all 3 of those things would make u think that there's no chance this install attempt would work, right. I thought so too. But I decided to give it a go and what I did differently this time than before wss that I installed PFW, but before the mandatory reboot I found the PFW folder in start menu and in there I tweaked the compatibility of the Privatefirewall 7.0 shortcut and actually from it I went into the Compatibility tab and then the bottom where it says 'Change settings for all users' which then gave me access to the actual PFGUI.exe and for that one I selected run in compatibility mode - Win XP SP3. Rebooted and since then it seems that it is working. Not sure if at some point I won't experience another of those other freezes (mentioned earlier) when PFW comes up with its warning pop-ups and that causes things to freeze, but for now it seems fine...

And as I said .. yes .. the hang The Red Moon was talking about (which is different than the freeze I'm talking about) is there but it's fine. It's there for 30 sec max .. so np with that.

 

Well ... it's a great firewall ... it used to be for sale, as i know, now it's free. If ppl knew what they were doing, they would be getting products like PFW, not the **** they pay for, but that's something else. Thanks for the note, Peter!

@The Red Moon - yep, Pale Moon is indeed my fav browser

 

I do not see how the PFW folks even expected a FREE firewall to make money. It wasn't like the free antiviruses where they have a NON-free version available, offering more features. The PFW firewall was all they had to offer. There was NO version for sale --NONE -- or I would have bought it.

My mind is boggled -- a fellow says (in effect) "I dropped my free product because it wasn't making any money." Good grief!!!

 

Well, it's a bit outdated but does the firewall still suffer from the leakage reported by Steve? I don't know much about this products but according to his test (and I trust him) then this firewall have/had several problems, but maybe this is fixed and we should give it another try.

 

What updates does a firewall need.When did the windows firewall for example get updated.?

 

No firewall has ever made any money to cover up the development. It is a moot point to talk about money and firewalls IMO.

 

Here we go again! This time in Win10. After I put my notebook pc to sleep and then I wake it up, it freezes upon waking up. Uninstalled PFW. Issue was not there. Reinstalled PFW, issue was there. Did that 2 more times, same result. I think the reason for that is that Win10 tries to connect immediately to the internet (I am on WiFi) after waking up from Sleep and it displays some fancy pictures before it lets you enter your user account password. So that led me to the logical thing of disconnecting from the WiFi and then entering Sleep again to see if PFW would cause the issue again. To my surprise … it did : ( I was hoping it wouldn’t, but it did. So how am I to make sense of this?

 

The firewall get's updates that's for sure, e.g. from Win 8 -> 10 it gots a little update to add the new integrating apps in the default rules and several minor fixes for Ceberos. If you monitor wilders firewalls often getting updates, like WFC and such to fix something or add new gimmicks. I wouldn't say it not gets updates, even on Linux iptables and nftables needs to be updated mostly after a new OS release or to handle new stuff. I also think Windows get's updates but it's difficult to say without changelogs/sources and in fact in the fast there exist several minor improvements.

 

Thanks guys, but can we stay on track here, please : ))) Let me repost again with the hope that someone would help out:

Here we go again! This time in Win10. After I put my notebook pc to sleep and then I wake it up, it freezes upon waking up. Uninstalled PFW. Issue was not there. Reinstalled PFW, issue was there. Did that 2 more times, same result. I think the reason for that is that Win10 tries to connect immediately to the internet (I am on WiFi) after waking up from Sleep and it displays some fancy pictures before it lets you enter your user account password. So that led me to the logical thing of disconnecting from the WiFi and then entering Sleep again to see if PFW would cause the issue again. To my surprise … it did : ( I was hoping it wouldn’t, but it did. So how am I to make sense of this?

 

Why not simply switch to another firewall or use the integrated? Problem solved, if you have that problem I would report it directly to developer, but without any logs this is difficult to understand or to reproduce. As said, and I only can speak about the mentioned article that firewall had several holes in the past and it seems it has problems on latest Windows too according to your words.

 

Thanks for your post. It's not necessarily holes in the firewalls... MS are idiots as we know well so it might easily be holes in Windows ... why holes in the PFW ... after some tweaking I managed to get it to work on Win7. Will reach the same on Win10...

Why would I switch to another one? I was advised that there isn't a better one, and I'd trust that opinion .. simply put. And so far, I like it too... cos it allows me full control over what's going on. Prompts me as needed when stuff happens without my knowledge and lets me decide what to do with that. What's not to love about that? Then I have the perfect control over all apps and processes and can block them as needed. What's not to love? Let me quote this guy here - 'firewalls are a bit different than typical programs; they are prone to causes conflicts on a case-by-case basis' Read more at http://dottech.org/100803/windows-best-free-firewall-program-review

The integrated one ... it sucks ... it's MS. Anything from MS .. especially as of recent days is big-brother-like ... Why would I trust their shitty firewall? I never really used it but as I see .. it offers no control whatsoever. I need the control found in PFW described in the above paragraph. Does the MS firewall give that? Don't think so. With Event Viewer I think you can sorta achieve some of the stuff, but not all of the stuff mentioned in the above paragraph ...

 

Please calm down, if you hate MS that much as you show over here why you use the OS? Makes not much sense, especially because the integrated is as good as any other, if you like popup gimmicks and believe in software based solutions you can use WFC which is free to use and in the Pro version you get your mentioned behavior and all of this with in-build firewall.

I doubt that especially the HIPS part will good work with latest Win 10 version because from what I can see the latest version is from 2013 and latest news are from May 2015. The strange part is that on the overview it says it isn't win 10 compatible while the other page says win 10 compatible, I guess it was just added to not lose some users. You review is also from 2013 and a lot of changed in meantime.

I say this again, just contact the developer and ask if this is still alive or plans to get it working on latest Win 10 version. We are not developers of this app and without anything as said it's impossible to say what could be the problem, I simply think this isn't anymore compatible (without testing it) and there are other forum entries saying that this product is 'dead', I also not understand why you simply not give other products a try, if you like HIPS then just install COMODO and you're good to go, a wrote a small review about this latest firewall on the thread and it works well on my 10 system.

 

No problem, mate! There is some truth to your words but you are also wrong at some point. PFW has been tested and works well in Windows 10 and Greg Salvato from the developers is quite responsive and trying to help out with the issue. However, besides communicating with him I think it's not a bad idea to communicate with others here on the forum, right? Right! So that's what I'm doing and what I expect to hear is a suggestion as to why PFW causes my Win10 to freeze when woken up from Sleep or Hibernate. From you of from others. No one said you guys are the developers. I only asked for help. If someone wants to help they'll do it. I've helped loads of ppl even without their asking for it so I'm sure someone would like to help out as well.

 

What does eventmgr + PerfMon say or show after the freeze?

 

Thanks for the post! Will get back to you just a bit later.

 

Just wanted to drop my 2 cents in on PFW. I haven't been able to install that thing since coming over to Windows 8 from XP and always just assumed it wasn't meant for my rigs anymore. It was always a nice little extra layer on XP and sorry can't offer anything Windows 7 because i skipped that one entirely.

Shame really that they chose not to develop this little HIPSter further then it went but so is been the case with plenty of predecessors before it.

Best of luck to getting to work though.

 

Found this :
* https://www.wilderssecurity.com/thre...-working-with-windows-10.379119/#post-2542367
* https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/privatefirewall-development.370789/#post-2438733
* https://www.wilderssecurity.com/thre...ted-service-path-privilege-escalation.370592/

This thing is definitely dead. I give up, makes no sense for me to help if others already tried to contact the developer and there is a critical hole which needs to be fixed, as mentioned this seems to be as not working anymore on latest Win 10.

But I will ask the developer and give him this link now, you can anyway post or attach your logs over here and he might fix this ... or not *lol*....