How to Disable the Windows XP Firewall

There are a number of reasons why you might want to disable Window's XP's firewall. Maybe you are operating on a secured, private network with all Internet traffic filtered through a router and server. Maybe you are having trouble deploying a piece of software, or querying a selected machine as an Administrator. Regardless of the reason, the article below provides some options to help you disable the Windows Firewall in Windows XP SP2, both manually and with automated processes.

Disabling the Windows Firewall
1.) The first option is to edit the registry. To do this click on START, then Run and open up REGEDIT. Navigate to the following keys and change these settings:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall\DomainProfile\EnableFirewall=0 (DWORD data type)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall\StandardProfile\EnableFirewall=0 (DWORD data type)

If you are deploying multiple machines you can then extract these keys as a reg key for later deployment.

To learn more about these registry edits, please review Microsoft's documentation on Windows XP SP2, "Deploying Windows Firewall Settings for Microsoft

Windows XP with Service Pack 2", which can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4454e0e1-61fa-447a-bdcd-499f73a637d1. Make sure you download the document entitled, "WF_XPSP2.doc".

2.) A second option is to edit firewall settings from the command line.

The following command will disable the Windows Firewall:

netsh.exe firewall set opmode mode=disable profile=all

To disable the firewall service entirely, also use the following code:

sc.exe config SharedAccess start= disabled

If you are deploying multiple machines you could easily write a batch file containing the above code for later deployment.

Documentation on the command line procedure is also available in Microsoft's document, "WF_XPSP2.doc"

Disabling Windows XP SecurityCenter

Many people looking for this information have also found it helpful to know how to disable the Windows XP Security Center as well. There are a couple of ways to do this.

1.) Disable the service manually

To disable the Windows XP Security Center service, navigate to START, Run, then type in "services.msc". In the list of services find "Security Center" and open it. Select "disabled" from the drop-down menu and click Apply.

2.) Disable without user interaction

If deploying a large amount of machines, or if you would rather this process be silent, you can run the following command line option:

sc.exe config SharedAccess start= disabled

If you are deploying multiple machines you could easily write a batch file containing the above code for later deployment.