Windows firewall unable to start service

[Palaksi]

I’m using Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2. I noticed that my Firewall is disabled hence tried to start but I got the following error message "Windows cannot start the Windows Firewall/ICS service." I went to check its settings under Control Panel->Security Center to see if there is something wrong in its settings but that ended up saying "Windows Firewall settings cannot be displayed because the associated service is not running. Do you want to start it???"

I’m also not able to access Internet on this PC thought it is connected to the working Network. I tried running netsh winsock reset command but received a message stating “Unable to reset the Winsock Catalog. The System cannot find the file specified.”

I don’t have any idea what else should I try to fix the problem. Can anyone here help me with this? Many Thanks.

[Jason A]

I strongly suspect NAV might have damaged the Visual Basic Runtime of your system. You can give a try to fix it but I don’t think it’s gonna work. Here is how you can do it. Just go to Start click Run, type the following command and press Enter:

regsvr32 msvbm60.dll

As expected if you get any error message than simply download and install Visual Basic 6.0 SP5: Run-Time Redistribution Pack (vbrun60sp5.exe) from here. Once it is installed, simply run netsh winsock reset to restore the Winsock. Hope it will help you.

[muarrif]

I am having the same problem as well but under Windows VISTA 32bit.

Any solutions yet?

[muarrif]

I was having a problem where I could not turn on the fire wall under Vista security center. I tried several different methods and did countless installations and uninstalls of AVG. AVG team spent three week at it too but we had no joy. So I had to re-image my PC to an image that was 3 months old and lost any data for those three months.

All ok now after reinstalling and installing a fresh copy of AVG with internet security modules.