Okay. Just found this lurking around. Eudora must have thrown this poor fellow in with my spam filters, and he deserves more than a two-month old post about fixing your firewall with a filed called sharedaccess.reg. And he deserves a response.
His name is Molinar and this is what he had to say:
Just passing by, but this post makes me shiver: if a program requires me to do this kind of stuff and open up my PC like this, it’s not getting into my ‘puter, to peer or not to peer.Seriously, applying semi-random changes to the registry? From a file found on the internet? and furthermore it requires your firewall to be disabled? Sheesh, hell no.Or maybe I read it wrong. I hope so.
Okay. First, I’ll clear a couple of things up. Sharedaccess.reg is, I believe, the original, clean version of your registry settings regarding your firewall. And you only are going to be using this if your firewall is malfunctioning. My particular version comes from a fairly legit Windows tweak site (read the hyperlink, follow it). If your firewall is up and working or up and not working by choice, then don’t download this file. But it saved me. That’s all I can say. I do not doubt your approach as a purist, Molinar. Purists make more money than me and end up managing networks much faster than I do, I’ll tell you that. But the simple answer to why I posted this is: I am not a purist. By default, if you’re getting a patch from my site, and I don’t say it’s from Microsoft, you better check it. A purist does that. I just fly by the seat of my pants. I get my desktop hijacked 8,000 times and have purists tell me over and over that there’s not solution except reformatting and reinstalling the OS and I just LOVE the problem and I sit there for hours until I have erased every trace of the hijack/trojan/worm/nasty thing.
Okay. That’s beside the point. The sharedacces.reg file works. I’ll vouch for it. Sure, tweaking your computer without really knowing what you’re doing is dangerous. But you can’t debate the fact that some legitimate Windows software can be more dangerous than a lot of innocous spyware out there. 🙂
So, point taken. Caveat Emptor with the file. It worked for me and it continues to work. But I like playing with fire — as an explicit example, I hardly ever use a firewall (go ahead, hack me, I’m not worth anything). This patch *will* restore your XP firewall to its original settings. But if you’re worried because it’s doing gnarly things to your registry, don’t worry, just look somewhere else. My one goal in sharing the file is to help people who fell into the same problem I did and needed a fix. So I took advice from ANOTHER board somewhere else that referenced this and decided to share it. I take no responsibility if it turns your powerful high-end PC into a toaster with a LCD screen.