Saturday, November 05, 2005

Windows XP Firewall Grayed Out and black screen

As I discussed yesterday, I'm working on another computer ravaged by viruses and spyware.

Well, after finally getting the machine cleaned up, I installed Windows XP SP2.
After the install, the screen went black after it got past the windows screen.
I finally went in through Safe Mode (F8) and the only thing I noticed was there were 2 video adapters installed. I disabled the on board video card, and all was good.

Well, with that part.

I went in to make sure that the firewall settings were turned on. Not only were they off, but they were grayed out. What I found was a program (probably a spyware program) put in the following 2 registry keys, both under the WindowsFirewall folder. With these keys disabled, even if you put Windows Firewall on your machine, it will not work, and it isn't easy to figure out. (I've spent hours.)

Under normal circumstances, the keys do not exist, so just delete the keys, reboot, and all is good. Well for me they were anyway.

As always, if you don't know what you are doing, don't mess with this, you screw up your registry, and you'll have a very bad day.

Anyway, here is what you need to delete

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Polices\WindowsFirewall

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the help but i would like to make a correction the key is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Polices\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall