Windows Firewall will not start

Hi, i am suing Windows XP and facing some serious problem with Firewall. No matter what i do, Windows Firewall is just not starting up. When i try to start it manually from Services.msc applet, it gives me an error message saying:

"Could not start the Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service on Local Computer.
Error 5: Access is denied."

Somebody suggested me to uninstall the firewall using "sc delete Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)" command, but when i try to do the same, it ends up with an error message saying

"[SC] OpenService FAILED 1060:
The specified service does not exist as an installed service."

I tried several more troubleshooting such as re-installing the entire Service Pack, running sfc /scannow, but yet no success. Hope somebody from here can help me starting Windows Firewall. Thank you.

What security suite have you installed? Is it Windows Live One Care? If yes, then Windows Firewall will not start no matter what you do. The reason is because live one care use to take the place of Windows XP firewall and disables it. Hence if you dont need to worry about security. But still if you need it, you will need to uninstall Live Care.

I appreciate your help Destiny, but i dont have any Live One Care installed on my pc. Now what has disabled the firewall?

Thanks again.

Just try out these steps Nachiketa and see if it works:

Go to Start > RUN > type the following command and press Enter
"netsh winsock reset". Once process is finished, restart the system. After rebooting, again go to Start > RUN > and type: "firewall.cpl" , press Enter

Now see if it brings you up the Firewall Control Panel on your display. If not open the run command again and type: services.msc, press Enter. Here locate Firewall Service and set it to Automatic by clicking on Properties

Thanks for the help buddy, my firewall is automatically set to Automatic in services but still it is not working. As per your suggestion i ran "winsock reset" successfully but when try to run "firewall.cpl" it pop up a message saying "firewall is not started, do I want to start it." It was good to see that message but when i click on YES, again i get the same error message as stated in my first post above.

Hello,

Just try out the detailed steps provided in the following mvps article. I am sure you will get the working fix for your problem. http://www.windowsxp.mvps.org/wscvsvcfix.htm

Now this was something useful, thank you Destiny. As suggested in that Article, i ran the following:

rundll32 setupapi,InstallHinfSection Ndi-Steelhead 132 %windir%\inf\netrass.inf

After this my PC restarted, then i ran reset and guess what, my firewall started. Since then no problem. Everything is working fine. Thank you very much for your help.