I just disabled the windows firewall anyway as it's just one more thing to cause problems, since I had a hardware firewall anyway. But in a way it sort-of serves as a very poor app i/o security policy. I say poor because I see little to stop apps from just fiddling with it, which defeats most of the point. If microsoft had any clue at all they would have made firewall objects and rules securable with the usual ACLs’ architecture that is used elsewhere. Can't believe that they did not. Actually that would be a really good upgrade for the o/s now, provided the performance did not suffer, which I think should not be a problem given a competent designer.