WinDVD4 is one of those annoying programs that comes pre-installed on your computer that likes to connect with the internet to ‘look for updates’ it can sell you. The updates never are free, so I customarily block it.
For some reason when I told Comodo 3.8 to prevent this behavior I ended up blocking the software from starting. Usually it continues to start but stops connecting to the internet. Now I can’t find the place in Comodo to edit or remove this setting and I would like to continue to use WinDVD4.
I would appreciate some assistance in learning how to remove this fatal setting from my firewall.
I think that I blocked the program using the Firewall section, but who knows, it is essentially possible that I somehow could have wandered of into the Defense+ area. Too late now if that is true.
I was obviously accustomed to working with an older version of Comodo Persoanl Firewall which allowed me to remove certain preferences, once chosen, directly from the user interface. My intentions in this case had been to halt the software from connecting to the web, and with the older version I had managed to do this by adding the exe file to the blocked file perimeter in Firewall preferences. If I had encountered a problem with that choice in the older version it would have been quite easy to back out of the choice which I had made in error. It would appear that this is not the case in the most recent version, also that some of the firewall behavior may be radically different from the version which I was familiar with.
I essentially came to the conclusion that my best choice was to completely uninstall my firewall… and than re-install it after confirming that the function of my DVD playback software had been restored. This did fix the problem by removing the bad settings that had locked the program software from being able to start.
The downside to that is that newer versions of Comodo Personal FIrewall have a gruesomely large update
after new installations which, considering that I use dialup… takes hours to complete. Oh well.
In spite of the problem which I encountered with WinDVD, I have actually used the block programs setting in the newest version of Comodo Internet Security on some other troublesome programs with great success and have not suffered a simular death of the software… the best of both worlds. Perhaps I am missing something or simply lost in the new interface to assume that I must now go into the Windows registry to ‘fix’ such problems if they do occur? That doesn’t seem particularly user friendly, but perhaps most users aren’t trying to tweak their system using the firewall to the degree that I would like to?
In any case it’s still great software. I know I’d rather have this on my machine by a wide margin than some of the standard fare that manufacturers like to dump on newly installed systems.
