Comodo FW Freezes PC

Help for v3
1

After several hours of working of new intallation of Comodo FW (installed + rebooted) , I have the following message almost for any action -

“Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.”

I have admin rights for this PC and even lost my right to reboot this box (:SAD)(( and start any exe file.
After HW restart and switching to safe mode I totally uninstalleed Comodo and now everything is ok.

Can anybody explain such strange behaviour of your application? I guess it is a shock for novice user.
File name - CFP_Setup_3.0.14.276_XP_Vista_x32.exe
My OS - XP SP2 fully patched + AVG Antivirus.
Any leads?
Best regards, Sergey Kharitonov.

2

Dear Sergey,

The first thing to understand is that your experience is not typical. I have almost the same set up except I do not have AVG anti-virus. But others have AVG antivirus and don’t have your set of problems either.

Bu if you are interested in trying comodo 3.0.14.276 again, I would first recommend that you DELETE THE COMODO DIRECTORY FIRST so nothing is remembered. Then shut down the SP2 firewall in the control panel. And reinstall comodo. Paying special attention to what initial check box choices you made as comodo installed.

Once comodo fully installs, its time for you to right click the comodo icon on the task bar. I very much wonder if your previous install somehow went into block all mode. Which might explain your set of symptoms. Usually train with safe mode is a good initial settings and you also have a disable option that can be useful for troubleshooting. And also again check that the sp2 firewall is still shut down
because the sp2 XP firewall has a nasty tendency to turn itself back on. And while we are discussing that, make sure you have no other firewalls on your computer.

But once you use the open option, you have a wealth of troubleshooting tools that will tell you what comodo is doing. And you can find various tutorials on this forum on how CPF3 should be set. And you can also post log files on this forum. There are many excellent responders on this forum who can and will help you.

In short, its really difficult to figure out what went wrong for you given what you posted. But I can only give what suggestions I have at this point.

3

I can only mention that my pc was totally blocked by Comodo FW and any of troubleshooting tools were completely unavailable. MS FW was switched off by default, I never used this application.
Sounds strange that my experience is comp-letely unique :BNC I’ll try to clean previous installation and make another attempt, greatest help MS for safe mode :SMLR

4

To Sergey,

Another possibility is in any hosts file applications you may have conflicting with the ones in defense plus in comodo. If so you might want to turn off any host files or not select defense plus in the install. And like I say, the SP2 firewall can and does turn itself on by default. Just go into the windows control panel, select firewall, and make sure its off. Then go into the security center, open up the firewall part, and check I have another firewall I will monitor myself.

But its a puzzling problem. You can only see if it happens again. Maybe someone else may have a better guess, but thats why troubleshooting is never fun. But even if you don’t have host files, you can still try not using defense plus to see if thats blocking you at install time.

5

To eggheadSV,

You are not alone! I ran into the same problem…incredibly frustrating to be told I can’t access my programs or even restart my computer.

To Osage,

He is not alone! This problem is NOT unique!

I actually ran into a scenario in which I turned off the firewall to try to fix the problem, only to find out that the problem still existed, and then I couldn’t even restart the firewall, because I didn’t “have the appropriate permissions” !!!

I don’t know what this stuff did to my system, but it was awful. Comodo kept crashing, asking me what I was doing when it crashed, and then telling me that the crash record was NOT sent to the developers and that I needed to send it myself. Which I would have, if I could have opened my internet browser.

Just as an FYI, I have a top-of-the-line system…well, it was a year and a half ago, any way. 2Gb RAM, 4 x 300Gb hard drives, a 64-bit AMD dual core processor, nVidia nForce 4 mobo, and two nVidia graphics cards in SLI mode. I have both the 32 and 64 bit editions of windows XP pro, fully patched, and each is on a separate hard drive. My anti-virus is mcAfee.

I uninstalled, deleted the folder, restarted, and reinstalled with JUST THE FIREWALL, not the defense plus, and things seem to be working fine now.

I’m going to keep using it and seeing how it goes, but I don’t personally know anybody else who would have spent as much time as I did trying to figure out what was wrong. I’m a software developer myself, so I know it can be hard to track down low-occurrence failures, but this IS a failure of the software. There are no circumstances under which I, as the owner and administrator of the hardware and software on the machine should be blocked from using anything, much less everything.

I hope that the info I provided helps some, and I hope that the problem is resolved soon. If there’s a more appropriate place for me to send this post, please let me know.