Anilrgowda

Question
I'm having some issues with disabling the firewall through a reg hack. I've read over the MS document that tells you that you need to create these 2 keys in the following area:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Win dowsFirewall
\DomainProfile \EnableFirewall=0 (DWORD data type)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Win dowsFirewall
\StandardProfile \EnableFirewall=0 (DWORD data type)

This is supposed to disable the firewall. Everytime I put them in there, the firewall is not disabled. I then found another piece of info through googling that these entries should be created BEFORE you install SP2. I did that next and still nothing.

I did some more googling and ran across a webpage that mentioned this reg key:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAcces s\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\StandardProfile\Enable Firewall=0 (DWORD data type)

Now, if I have ALL three of those keys in there, the firewall is turned OFF, but not disabled (greyed out) like MS indicates should happen.

The HKLM\SYSTEM key seems to supercede the other 2. I can turn the firewall on and off through that key alone while the other 2 apparently have no effect.

My question is this, what is going on? Almost all info I've found points to the first 2 reg keys being the only things needed to disable the firewall through the registy. But in my attempts to do this, I've been almost completely unsuccessful. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Solution
I'm not sure if the firewall will be that easy to disable. It would be kind of silly to have a firewall that can be disabled with a simple "net stop" command, since malware could execute the same command, defeating the entire point of having a firewall in the first place. I may be wrong, but I think that, once the firewall is up and running, it requires user interaction to disable. If not, the firewall is pointless.

However, the good news is that you can deploy SP2 in such a way that the firewall is never enabled on it. The following document explains how to do it:

http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...8/WF_XPSP2.doc

One way to do it is with the registry keys you initially posted. They work, but only if they exist *before* SP2 is installed. Another way would be to use unattended.txt or Netfw.inf while deploying SP2. The document above explains how to do so.