Windows XP SP2 firewall woes

I have a group policy that is supposed to disable the XP SP2 firewall on our
network. It seems to work for some machines but others still have the
firewall setting turned on, eventhough the policy seems to have been applied
to the PC. The firewall is not allowing SMS or other types of management
software to run correctly.
Is there a bullet-proof way of disabling the firewall enterprise-wide? Later
I will re-enable it with proper ports open, but for now I want it off.

Thanks for any assistance,

I would normally say just turning it off in your user's group policy should
do this. I am not sure if a local policy has overwritten this or not.

I would open a new MMC on the machines having issues and open the Resultant
Set of Policy MMC Snap/In. Choose Action --> Generate RSoP Data and choose
the local computer. This will show you the result of all policies applied to
the machine. Drill down to the Administrative Templates --> Network -->
Network Connections --> Windows Firewall and check the firewall settings. One
of the tabs is Precedence which will give you the exact policy that is
applied that is messing things up.

I hope that helps.

"Boobatron" wrote:

> I have a group policy that is supposed to disable the XP SP2 firewall on our
> network. It seems to work for some machines but others still have the
> firewall setting turned on, eventhough the policy seems to have been applied
> to the PC. The firewall is not allowing SMS or other types of management
> software to run correctly.
> Is there a bullet-proof way of disabling the firewall enterprise-wide? Later
> I will re-enable it with proper ports open, but for now I want it off.
>
> Thanks for any assistance,

The bottom of this page had the answer I was looking for, nice n' simple.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro.../wfsp2wgp.mspx

Thanks Samson for the suggestion.