Windows Firewall

[dalsimer]

Using Windows XP, professional I am unable to access windows firewall. The message I get is:
"Windows Firewall settings cannot be displayed because the associated service is not running. Do you want to start the Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service?"

When I click "yes" the message is "Windows cannot start the Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service."

I have Googled these messages and had all sorts of advice from MicroSoft, but nothing has helped.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Walt in Indiana

[Welshjim]

dalsimer--

Windows cannot start the Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service.

Did you set both of these Services to Start automatically?
From a command prompt run services.msc

[dalsimer]

By both I assume yoou mean the Windows Firewall and the Security items (there were 2), and yes both are set for automatic and show "started".

[fink]

To be clear, there's also a specific "Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)" service that should be set to automatic and running.

[SuperSparks]

If this is something that started happening only recently, then this would be a good case for using System Restore to roll back to a point before the problem started.

[dalsimer]

Wow!!! Thanks for all the idea. I had already tried restoring, but didn't work.
Today, I went into services.msc and found a lot of "services" were disabled and/or not "started". Fortun ately, my wife's computer is a duplicate of mine, so using her settings I changed settings to the same as hers (automatif and/or manual and "start" when needed. Voila ... Windows firewall now runs as expected!!!

Don't know when I turned it off (or why), but since it's running now I won't look any further. I have run several spyware programs and Windows Essential anti-virus program and seem to be clean.
Thanks to all who got involved!!!

[Welshjim]

dalsimer--Glad to hear the good news.

[dalsimer]

Once again, thanks to all for the help and interest.

Walt