SP2 with its "firewall" - Contention problems if Ialready use a 3rd Party firewall?

Until there is more study on this question, it is better just to use one firewall unless you have a hardware firewall and softwar firewall.  I too have read somewhere that having the microsoft firewall on, and a third party firewall at the same time would not hurt, which is kind of hard to believe.  Just to be safe until more hard study is done with the microsoft firewall and a third party firewall, you would be advised to use only one software firewall.   Many are using a hardware firewall and software firewall that do not conflict with each other and is advised for more security.   Hope this confuses you even more

Message Edited by Unhappy45 on 08-20-2004 09:23 AM

Actually, when I installed SP2,  my McAfee firewall was recognized,  and the new windows XP firewall was turned OFF by default.

Same situation with the auto starting Zone Alarm Pro firewall. Windows sp2 firewall is turned off automatically. Here are Firewall directions from MS: If you choose to install and run another firewall, turn off Windows Firewall.

What the original poster wanted to know, would two software firewalls have conflict with one another.  Most threads I have read says it would have a conflict, but a more resent article states that window's firewall and another software firewall may not have conflict working together....We will have to wait and see when more testing is done......

Even if they don't conflict, what's the point of running both simultaneously?

The nice new feature is that if security centre recognises your 3rd party firewall and monitors it, should your firewall break or be switched off, the XP firewall will kick in (and turn itself off again when your firewall is switched back on). I have tested this with ZA (free) 5.1.011.

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@JRosenfeld wrote:

The nice new feature is that if security centre recognises your 3rd party firewall and monitors it, should your firewall break or be switched off, the XP firewall will kick in (and turn itself off again when your firewall is switched back on). I have tested this with ZA (free) 5.1.011.

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Did you have to do anything to enable this or does SP2 automatically turn itself off and only monitor ZA?

 I tried this and the Windows firewall came on as soon as I disabled ZA. Neat feature with no user intervention.

As I understand it, security centre by default monitors the third party firewall if it is one it recognises. ZA switched off the XP firewall on the restart after installing SP2 (that option, in ZA (free 5.1.011) is in ZA control panel, firewall, main tab, advanced, also checked by default).

You can check that the monitoring works: In security centre, under Firewall, the status message is displayed (click chevron next to Firewall if the message is not showing); with ZA on it says 'Zone Alarm firewall is currently ON'. If you shut down ZA (right click on icon in system tray), the message will say 'Windows Firewall is currently on'; when you restart ZA (e.g. from start menu, all programs, Zone Labs folder), the message changes back to 'Zone Alarm firewall is currently ON'. So it is monitoring and automatically switching on the XP firewall if ZA is out of action.

Note: if you shut down ZA, the setting in Windows firewall also changes from off to on but it does not change back to off when you restart ZA, so either change that back to off manually, or on restart ZA will do it.

In many cases, the MS firewall can co-exist with a third party software firewall.  Hoever, this is not true 100% of the time.  There have been some cases on this forum where a user with the original XP sp1 firewall and a thrid party firewall at the same time did have problems such as email not working properly, or overall slow internet connection or system performance.  By turning off the MS XP firewall, it resolved these problems.  I've seen this issue with Norton 2003 and McAfee (can't remember which versions). 

However, it didn't impact all users, which was odd.  It may have been that only certain configurations of features on/off caused the conflict, I never saw any further trouble shooting on the issue, so I'm not certain.  I would expect similar issues with the sp2 firewall, but we'll need to wait and see.

As has been posted, though.  Why run two?  sp2 will dedect most third party firewalls and disable its own firewall by default.  This would seen to use up less system resources, and eliminate a potential system stability risk.

I downloaded XP SP2 and although it turned the Win Firewall off, it conflicted with my Norton Internet Security 2004 Firewall to the extent that it wouldn't let me open IE or download emails to Outlook.

I've now turned off the Norton Firewall and the Win XP one on and all is working fine.

I'd prefer to use the Norton Firewall but can't find out how to get it working on SP2......any ideas ??