Cant turn off Windows firewall

This is Windows XP desktop. I have some problems in one of my office projects and my friend wants to help me over remote assistance. But as my Firewall is On he is not able to connect my system. Hence I want to disable Windows Firewall for few hours but when I go to disable, I found the Turn Off button grayed out. It is unclickable. How can I disable Firewall on my PC?

I forgo one more thing to ask. If the Firewall is not the reason why my friend is not able to connect me, then is there any other ting blocking the connection? DO i need to allow/open anything else to get remote assistance to connect to
my machine?

Thanks for your helps.

Hello Lanwench,

Just go through the following steps to fix the problem of grayed out options in Windows Firewall:

• Click Start, Run and type Regedit.exe
• Navigate to the following location:
  
  Quote:

  ---

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Policies \ Microsoft \ WindowsFirewall

  ---

• Backup the key and then delete the WindowsFirewall branch.
• Close Regedit.exe and restart Windows.

Let me know if you face any problem with the same.