When I was using the x86 RC1 of Windows 7 one day my computer stopped accepting incoming connections, and I mean all of them.You were unable to ping it from any machine on the network, unable to browse it's shares, unable to access the website on it.I put off re-installing the OS for 4 months until the final of Win7 came out and I have now installed Windows 7 Professional x64.Incoming connections were working straight away when I installed it, made my life a lot easier and was able to use a variety of programs I couldn't before.Anyway, 2 days ago my Windows 7 has stopped accepting incoming connections.The day before I was happily playing Call of Duty overLAN, now I am unable to host a game. Ping, file sharing, etc are all broken again.I haven't installed any additional software or changed any settingsso I am at a loss on how to explain it.It's very annoying and I would like to fix it without having to re-install my entire OS. On both installs I disabled the Firewall as soon as I installed it, but I thought maybe the connections issue may be firewall related. When I try and start the Firewall though I get an error about the service no longer working.Could a Windows Update be breaking my installs?Edit: Just checked System Restore, the oldest restore point was yesterday so I can't try going back to before the problem occured with that.

Maybe your Local Area Network is classified as Public, why don't you look atNetworking and Sharing and check that. If the Lan is Public a lot of services are blocked. If this is right, change to private and test again.Fernando Peralta | MCITP:EA, MCTS:Windows Vista, MCSE, MCSA:Security

Network is not classified as public, still says Home. I tried changing to Public & back to Home but did nothing. Edit: Perhaps it has something to do with this? Although in typical Windows fashion it does not tell me what exactly I am being denied access to so I can't fix the permissions on it. Here's the "very useful" -cough- Details view: - <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"> - <System> <Provider Name="Service Control Manager" Guid="{555908d1-a6d7-4695-8e1e-26931d2012f4}" EventSourceName="Service Control Manager" /> <EventID Qualifiers="49152">7024</EventID> <Version>0</Version> <Level>2</Level> <Task>0</Task> <Opcode>0</Opcode> <Keywords>0x8080000000000000</Keywords> <TimeCreated SystemTime="2009-11-28T00:57:30.357691800Z" /> <EventRecordID>8013</EventRecordID> <Correlation /> <Execution ProcessID="504" ThreadID="4820" /> <Channel>System</Channel> <Computer>FOX</Computer> <Security /> </System> - <EventData> <Data Name="param1">Windows Firewall</Data> <Data Name="param2">%%5</Data> </EventData> </Event>

Hi, Based on my research, I would like to suggest the following: 1. Check if this Windows 7 can access the network resources on LAN and Internet without issues. 2. Boot the Windows 7 computer to Safe Mode with networking and check if this computer can be accessed. 3. Please check if the Windows Firewall is enabled. If not, please enable it and see how it works. 4. Regarding the Event ID 7024, please also refer to the following Knowledge Base article and try the method: Some services do not start in Windows Vista Thanks.Nicholas Li - MSFT

Okay i re-installed windows again but instead of disabling the firewall this time i've left it on. I changed the options to always allow all incoming connections and all outgoing connections, so in effect it does nothing. Hopefully it wont mess up and block all incoming this time. 1. The computer could access any resources without issue, it's only incoming connections that were affected. 2. I did not try that 3. Windows Firewall was definitely disabled 4. Thanks for the link, shame I reinstalled last night before I saw it.

Hi, Thank you for your update. Lets continue monitoring this issue, if the issue reoccurs, please also try the suggestions to see if it helps; and if you need further investigation, please feel free to let us know. Thanks again. Have a nice day! Nicholas Li - MSFT