we have a group policy to disable the windows firewall service for a certain set of computers on the domain.
this works to disable the service, however it appears that there are some firewall rules that are being applied. it takes a firewall service start to get the policy to allow all connections to begin to work. we can then disable the service and things continue to function normally.
this is very strange behavior as having the firewall service disabled in the first place would, very simplisticly, seem to take it out of operation. but with the service stopped, there are blocking rules being applied. only after starting the firewall service does the "unblocking" of ports seem to occur. then once we stop the firewall service, ports are still open.
why does it take a start of the firewall service then stop of the same service to get the firewall rules to get out of the way?