Sophos keeps stopping windows firewall service (anyone else experecing this?)

[Rob_D]

Hi guys,

 

Recently (well, for about 8 months or so now), we have been having an issue whereby some of our windows 7 computers (of various ages and builds) running Sophos AV stop being pingable.

It turns out that something (sophos) is stopping the windows firewall service which puts the computer into "lockdown" mode, which stops remote access while still allowing access out from the computer so the use remains unaware. This can be fixed by manually restarting the firewall service or rebooting the computer.

This happens about 50% of the time.

 

Has anyone else ever had (or similar) issues while running Sophos?

And does anyone know how to fix it?

 

Thanks in advance.

[jonnykewell1]

Are you pushing out the sophos firewall too? If so won't that disable the windows firewall?

[Rob_D]

Thanks, for your reply. No, we're just pushing out the endpoint protection. And the windows firewall is disabled via GPO for all domain computers. But the Windows Firewall Service still needs to run on the computers, and is (by default) set to automatic startup.