How to turn off windows firewall in the GPO

How to turn off Windows Firewall for all the clients as it is causing problems and duplication of work for us. We have a firewall installed at the gateway currently and also Sophos Client firewall installed on the clients as this enables us to see what items are blocked on a particular users system in a central location. From there we can then decide to unblock or add a custom rule etc which is far better than just adding programs and ports via the GPO with windows firewall because it opens just the necessary ports that each users need. So, can anybody help? Thanks.

You can try to configure Windows Firewall in a Small Business Environment Using Group Policy. Follow the below link that explains how to configure the features of Windows Firewall on computers running Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (SP2) in a small or medium-sized business (SMB) environment. The environment might include domain controllers running Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../cc875816.aspx

It could be possible that you cannot configure Windows Firewall settings or Security Center settings on a Windows XP Service Pack 2-based client computer that is in a Windows Small Business Server 2003-based network. This issue occurs because Group Policy in Windows Small Business Server 2003 disables Windows Firewall for client computers that are running Windows XP Professional. So, to solve this issue, go to this website - http://support.microsoft.com/?id=872769