Is Norton Internet Security Firewall Blocking Programs Net Access?

Is Norton Internet Security blocking internet access to your computer programs? My friends computer has Firefox that was not able to open any site, while Internet explorer worked. It seemed somehow firefox was being blocked internet access. Read on…

This is what I figured out and may be helpful to you if some of your programs are not working on the internet. His computer was a new powerful Pentium 4 with all high end specifications. And he had preinstalled Norton Internet Security 2005 and Norton Antivirus 2005.

Norton Internet Security 2005 has an effective firewall. This is in addition to the Windows firewall. Firewalls monitors and restricts information that travels between your computer and a network or the Internet and provides a line of defense against someone who might try to access your computer from outside the Firewall without your permission. In this case the windows firewall was disabled and Norton Firewall was activated and the main one.

When some program from your computer tries to connect to the internet, Norton Internet Security gives a prompt, which has options to allow or block the access. Many times the recommended option is to block the access. So be careful to see what you are blocking internet access before clicking OK.

• Click the Norton Security icon at the bottom right corner in your system tray. On the pop up window, first check if you have not clicked “Block Traffic” button. As this will block all internet access.
• If that is ok, maybe the program has been blocked access and has to be unblocked manually. But it was not easy to find where was the blocked list. But here is it location. Go to Norton Internet Security > System and Settings and this is what you see in the image below.
• Then you see that the Personal firewall is turned on to protect from unauthorized access to spyware, adware and other unwanted software. Click “Configure” button.
• Go to Programs and scroll down the list for Manual Program Control. There you will see the individual internet access settings for each individual program. And you see that Mozilla Firefox setting shows “Block All”.
• From the drop down list select “Permit All” and now open Firefox. It works! And he is back to using firefox as his default browser again. (Not to mention the pizza as a reward!)
• Now you can scroll through the entire list and individually set the programs to allow and block internet access. Now you may fix some programs not working with the internet which you might have blocked by mistake. You can also set some allowed programs to block.

I hope this tip helps. Now figure out the Custom option yourself!