windows firewall on my vista won't open any of my security and i do need my firewall on

If your computer is connected to a domain, your system administrator might be controlling those settings through Group Policy. Also, please see if the information in the KB below helps: Some services do not start, and you receive an error message after you join a Windows Vista-based computer to a Windows 2000-based domain: "1279, a privilege that the service requires to function properly does not exist" If you are not in the above scenarios, you may temporarily disable the antivirus and boot in Clean Boot to see if the issue persists. Sabrina TechNet Community Support