ESET Mail Sec personal firewall error

On a server running ESET Mail Security 4.3.10016 for Exchange, we're receiving the following error -

"An error occurred while reading control file. The Personal firewall will not work."

This is on plugin "Personal Firewall"

This has only started SINCE we rebooted the server since installing ESET Mail Security. Previously it only had NOD32 on it. It never had a previous release of mail security. Mail security was running for a few days before the reboot as we had to schedule an outage. NO errors until the reboot. Now we get every few hours.

Kicker? We have personal firewall disabled on this box (And all boxes.) So we're not having issues that we're aware of, but also don't want errors building up.

This is an Exchange 2010 box.

 

Do you have ESET Mail Security for MS Exchange 4.3 installed ? If so and you use Windows 2008, is the option for automatic protocol protection start disabled ?

 

Yes, ESET Mail Security 4.3.10016 for Exchange is installed.

Re your question: "is the option for automatic protocol protection start disabled "

If you're referring to the "Automatic start of application protocol scan" under the personal firewall, it is disabled.

Though I notice the option above it, "Application protocol content filtering" is set to YES.

Finally, the "Firewall system integration" is set to "Personal firewall completely disabled."

 

Anyone else have any ideas?

I did now also find that any time we log into the server, we get a dialogue box which states, "Failed to read firewall configuration."

After we OK that message, we get this -

"An error occurred while reading control file. The Personal firewall will not work." We have to OK this message lots of times before it goes away.

Which is odd - since we have it disabled anyway.

 

Make sure that the current user has read or RW permissions for the "%ProgramData%\ESET\ESET Mail Security" folder

 

User is domain admin. Just verified - yes, they do have full rights to that folder. Anything else we can check?

 

I'd suggest contacting customer care and providing them the output of running "cacls %ProgramData%\ESET\ESET Mail Security" as well as the name of the currently logged user. A Process Monitor log created at the moment the error occurs would be of help as well. If the error occurs during the system startup, creat a boot log using Process monitor.

 

Just sent that over. On 2008 R2, you need to use icacls.

Was previously talking to an engineer. He recommended uninstalling everything using the uninstall tool while in safe mode. Did that, fought with the NIC drivers and settings for a bit, and finally got things stable.

Did one more clean reboot, then installed just mail security. After a reboot - same error. Then I found MS Exchange transport was having issues and logging stuff in the event monitor and wouldn't start automatically. So I finally ditched the effort and rolled back to a snapshot I took prior to playing.