This one was strange... On my laptop I access my server and its shares by using \\server as the address. This has always worked fine, up until today when it suddenly stopped working. I had no idea why and there was no reason for it to stop working. I tried the usual checks, firewall, disabled them completely, checked the anti virus wasn't interfering, that wasn't it either, rebooting the system, again, nothing. I couldn't understand it.

My next action was to try the IP, which in my case was \\192.168.1.100, nice and easy to remember. No go! What the hell, I thought. So I tried through network places. That worked... Very strange. Although I could access it through network places, that wasn't good enough for me, since it worked before so it should work now.

I tried checking the servers firewall, and it told me the Firewall/ICS service wasn't running. Thats strange because I never disabled it, so I went into services to start it again. When I hit start I got an access denied error. Thats even weirder because its trying to run as system, so it shouldn't get access denied errors. I tried entering Administrator as the username to start under and the password, but that refused to start as well...

Well, I did a quick google for "access denied starting windows firewall xp" and clicked the first result, which took me here.

It suggested running this in a command prompt...

Immediately followed by...


After running it I tried restarting the service again, and it still wouldn't start. I decided a reboot was in order to give it a chance to reload everything after the reset. I rebooted the server and waited a few minutes.

As all of you may know, the server is in my converted loft, and I'm lazy so I just use RDC (Remote Desktop) to access the server instead of going up there to do everything. Well after 2-3 minutes the server should have been rebooted a fair amount of time, but the RDC wasn't connecting, nor was the server responding to pings. I thought to myself, "not again!", referring to yesterdays problems. I went up there and turned the monitor on, to find it sitting on the desktop perfectly fine. Huh! Wait a second, if I just reset the firewall, the default is on, not off. I checked the firewall and there it was, switched on. I turned it off, went back down to my laptop and found it pinging away, and when I opened the RDC that connected fine.

Now the real test, try the networking. I typed in \\server, hit enter, and et viola! It works again. Like I said in the last post, everyone is a winner!

The words of the amazing Andy "Everyone is a winner"
Pritty odd tho get vista on it

I had the same message a while back on my other system. It annoyed the hell out of me because I also couldnt have internet connection sharing because the firewall service is the same one as the internet connection sharing service.

@offtopic 123rd post!!

Its strange though, because my desktop pc could access it just fine, and thats on Vista. Not quite sure why Vista can and XP can't though.