This one surprised me a bit. here’s the deal: if you explicitly stop the “Windows Firewall” service (MpsSvc), you’ll kill all inbound networking to the OS and all of its services (thirdparty services apparently still work, according to one report I got). The system will not respond to ping, Remote Desktop, net view, and so on. However outbound networking continues to work fine. In the video below I show it happening on Win7; I tested it to be true in Vista as well. I did not test Win2008/Win2008R2, but I expect those operating systems act the same way.
I was unable to find any specific documentation from MS explaining this. Services.msc doesn’t mention it in the description pane, nor in the dependencies if you get properties of the service.
Takeaway point: do not stop the Windows Firewall service when you are remoted into a system. It has the opposite of the intended effect! Instead, use the command netsh firewall set opmode mode=disable
