I'm trying to enable pings to get through the firewall on VIsta (64-bit). When I get to the Firewall configuration screen, I go to Inbound rules and open "Networking - Echo Request (ICMPv4-In)". The resulting dialog box contains a message saying "This rule has been applied by the system administrator and cannot be modified." The dialog box wouldn't let me change the settings. In the past, a group policy was enforced upon our domain so that by default, every computer has the firewall turned on with various exceptions allowed. I thought that this group policy might be responsible for my inability to change the inbound rule. Therefore, I went to the group policy editor. The setting for "Windows Firewall: Allow ICMP exceptions" was not configured so it shouldn't have had any effect on the domain. Nevertheless I enabled the setting anyway. That didn't change my problem...and I did boot the domain controller and the local machine, as well as giving the policy change time to propagate through the network. (Of course, I was doing all this as System Administrator.) So if it's not the group policy, what's preventing me from changing the firewall configuration? How do I get pings to work?

Have you tried to ping when the firewall was turned off?

Hi, You can try modifying the options by using network administrator account, and can also use gpupdate /force to initialize group policy refresh. In addition, you can run the following command in a elevated CMD window to enable ICMP traffic. netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMPv4 Inbound" dir=in action=allow enable=yes profile=any localip=any remoteip=any protocol=icmpv4:8,any interfacetype=any edge=yes For more information: Ping! http://blogs.msdn.com/p2p/archive/2007/07/03/ping.aspx