Help please over Windows firewall and start-up delay

[maxfindlay]

I have a one-year-old laptop running XP Pro. Recently, I've started
experiencing a problem with Windows firewall. When I turn on my laptop,
everything appears to boot up fine and then I get a pop-up message in the
bottom right hand corner of the screen saying "Your computer might be at
risk. No firewall has been turned on". (I should explain that the Windows
firewall has always been set to "on" in Control Panel.) After an age, the
laptop logs onto my network and the pop-up message disappears. But the whole
booting up process has now suddenly become very lengthy. I haven't added any
new software and I'm not aware of having made any other changes to my laptop.
This problem appears to have arrived out of the blue. A mate suggested that a
Windows update might have corrupted something but there are so many of these
that I don't know how to find which one(s) did the damage. I would be very
grateful for any help that anyone could give me. Thank you.

[Brian]

I started having the exact same problem after a recent Window Update was
applied. Getting in touch with Microsoft support is nearly impossible, so
I'm hoping they are aware of this issue and working on a fix in another
update.

I too have Windows firewall turned on and it does eventually recognize that
it's on and the message goes away, but it does concern me that there is a
window of opportunity for someone to get on my computer before the firewall
finishes coming up.

[maxfindlay]

Thanks for sharing this with me. In the end, I only resolved the problem by
turning the firewall on and off repeatedly and then rebooting -- it's as if
the machine finally said "OK I've had enough. I'll behave." But what a
palaver.

Regards

Max