3 replies to this topic

[hazelnut]

I installed a program yesterday and opened exceptions in windows firewall for it. An hour later I totally uninstalled it. This morning when I turned on my computer I just thought I'd check the firewall settings. The program was still in it as were the port exceptions. I had assumed an uninstall would include the firewall exceptions.
Would this have meant if I hadn't checked, that those ports would have been kept open?

[Andavari]

hazelnut, on Aug 14 2006, 05:47 AM, said:

Would this have meant if I hadn't checked, that those ports would have been kept open?

It's hard to know exactly since Windows Firewall doesn't come with the best documentation of it's workings, therefore I don't know if a missing .exe file can leave open ports or not.

You probably already know this; under the Exceptions tab if that missing program is still listed you can highlight it, then click the Delete button to get rid of it.

[hazelnut]

As soon as I saw that the named port exceptions were still there I quickly learnt that I could highlight and delete them!
It's a lesson learnt for me that port exceptions manually created for a program in windows firewall, must be manually deleted after program uninstallation.

[Andavari]

hazelnut, on Aug 14 2006, 10:27 AM, said:

It's a lesson learnt for me that port exceptions manually created for a program in windows firewall, must be manually deleted after program uninstallation.

Any firewall is that way. Unless of course it was some bloated program which you'd use a System Restore point to get rid of. I don't know if an ERUNT backup would get rid of them or not. I personally don't allow Exceptions in Windows Firewall and have ticked on the General tab "Don't allow exceptions" and as of yet (knock on wood) I haven't had to enable exceptions.