I recently had to install my OS again and I’m only beginning to re-install my games, but I’m having trouble with getting games to work and especially ones that are started through Steam.
I made Steam.exe a trusted application and skipped parent checks and did the same for HL2.exe but when trying to play CS Source or HL2 DM they both stall at the initialisation of the game. It’s very hard to alt-tab out of, but the couple of times I manged to do that before the game auto closed itself to desktop I saw a firewall warning and the log also is riddles with “suspicious behaviour” and “denied access”.
I tried to play HL2 the single game itself, but even that crashed on me and I saw Comodo flash ever so briefly a popup that said something like "HL2 is an stealth invisible … ".
I als got Stalker which constantly crashes on me within a minute of starting to play it and I thought this might have to do with grapics or sound problems, but now that I noticed the problems I have with steam and it’s related games I’m starting wonder if me problems with that game aren’t also related to the Comodo firewall.
I know that as soon as I disabled the Comodo firewall CS Source and HL2 DM worked flawlessly so it’s defenitely Comodo Firewall that is causing problems even though I set these programs as trusted applications.
Is there any way to check for me what the current settings are or is there someone that had similar problems that has a solution as how to fix this?
Where it concerns applications like games that run full screen, it’s advisable to add these manually, allowing all activity initially until you can identify the ports it uses, unless you know those beforehand of course.
Once you’ve established the initial rule, launch the game, play a few minutes, then exit and open the Logs menu. Right click anywhere in the listing and choose Export HTML. Give it a name and then save it somewhere on your hard drive: the “My Documents” folder will do.
Open the file and hit CTRL+F and type in the name of the game. If you’re using Firefox, the search will automatically jump to that name. IE does something similar, but you have to click “Find next” first.
Some of the entries will only be informational, but the ones you need to take note of are those that specify that certain components need to be approved. For example, in the first image below, I’ve ringed three files that belong to “Punkbuster” for “Joint Operations Typhoon Rising” which need to be added to the Components Control menu. You’ll no doubt find similar things for your own games.
It’s also a good idea to check the IPs in context of, in this particular case, Steam in case any of them are being blocked by the firewall. There’s a free utility called IPNetInfo which you can download from here which will help you identify which IPs belong to Steam. Just type in the IP adress in IPNetInfo’s search field and click OK. Then double click the result and you’ll see something like the details shown for Novalogic which is the developer and publisher of Joint Ops. All you need to do then is to define a rule to allow that IP which might be either incoming or outgoing (or both), in addition to the reason such as “PORT UNREACHABLE” for example. The reason will be shown in the log.
It’s all a bit laborious I know, but worth taking the time and effort to track these things down in order to avoid connection problems with your game.
I have the same problem and it has nothing to do with connecting to the internet, i found that defining the app as an installer/updater helps. the problem is with application permissions, the firewall just doesn’t allow the game to run. hopefully the guys at Comodo fix the problem because it’s mighty annoying.