Cannot start Windows Firewall Service
If you are getting an error message, e.g. Error Code 5, when starting Windows Firewall or the Windows Firewall service is not even showing up in the Services section. Then most likely your computer is or at one time was infected with a virus. To get it back up and running, you would need to restore the Firewall registry and maybe the BFE registry too. The BFE (Base Filtering Engine) is a service that controls how network traffic are filtered.
1.) You would need to download these three registry files by right clicking on it and choose “Save as”. Make sure the file extension is “.reg”
BFE registry (BFE.reg)
Firewall registry (MpsSvc.reg)
Shared Access registry (SharedAccess.reg)
2.) Once downloaded, double click on them to install it. Click on “Yes” if prompted.
3.) Click on the “Start” button (Press Windows+R) and then type in “regedit” to go into your computer’s registry.
4.) Navigate to the following location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\BFE
5.) Right click on the folder and choose “permissions”
6.) Click on “Add” and then type in the word “everyone”
7.) Change the permission for the user “everyone” by highlighting it and Give it “Full control“.
8.) Navigate to the following location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\SharedAccess
9.) Right click on the folder and choose “permissions”
10.) Click on “Add” and then type in the word “everyone”
11.) Change the permission for the user “everyone” by highlighting it and Give it “Full control“.
12.) Restart your computer
13.) Once restarted, go into your Services by pressing the “Windows+R key” and type in “services.msc” and see if the Base Filtering Engine and the Windows Firewall have been started or not. If started, then congratulation you have fixed your Windows Firewall issue. If not, then review any error message and search around.
Note: You might also want to run the RKILL.EXE program to check if there are any malware programs running on your computer. Click here to download the RKill.exe program. Once downloaded, run it and it will scan your computer for any issues. If it listed that there are Missing ImagePath, then you would need to restore those registry files.
e.g.
* BFE [Missing ImagePath]
* iphlpsvc [Missing ImagePath]
* MpsSvc [Missing ImagePath]
* SharedAccess [Missing ImagePath]
* WinDefend [Missing ImagePath]
* wscsvc [Missing ImagePath]
From the above result page, we would need to restore all these 6 registry files.
To download registry files, you can visit this site: