Thursday, January 31, 2013

Fix spurious XP warning 'firewall not started', howto

Spuriously the last few days, booting my XP computer, I've been warned my firewall is down (in a yellow message bubble). Microsoft's Security Center software (running locally) says, "Microsoft Security Essentials is turned off." The message is not transient, either.

However, real-time protection is running just fine!

Running Microsoft's WMIDiag diagnostic tool didn't help, but web searching the message gave me this procedure (to rebuild a corrupted WMI repository—when prompted, answer yes):

> cd %windir%\system32\wbem
> net stop winmgmt
> dir /ad
> ren Repository Repository.old
> net start winmgmt
> net start "security center"
> firewall.cpl

Then in the General tab, select 'On' to restart Windows Firewall.

If you really want to understand WBEM (mentioned above, Web-Based Enterprise Management, or Microsoft's version: WMI, Windows Management Instrumentation) you can click this humorously easy introduction or web-search it.

Copyright (c) 2013 Mark D. Blackwell.

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