FungusMental

I know how Windows should display its firewall screen when a 3rd party firewall is installed. As described, the issue occurs on some reboots, but not all. When ESS registers correctly, I am seeing the screen you've posted above. I've had to make it a habit of going into Windows Firewall control panel on each reboot, in order to ensure everything is working as it should. When ESS doesn't register correctly, I always reboot again... Which could be several times in a row. Also, as suggested, I have tried reinstalling ESS but this has not fixed the issue. Considering this issue has occurred on two separate PCs and also after reinstallation (even reinstalling Windows), I doubt it's just a number of bad installs. I'm certain there is something else affecting the installation of ESS, although it is definitely not malware or viruses as I run full system scans on a frequent basis.

I have ESS version 9.0.381.0 installed on Windows 10 Professional (64-bit). Frequently when I reboot my system, I'll notice that ESS does not correctly register its firewall module with Windows. ESS itself does not detect any issues when I look at active protection, but if I look at Windows' own firewall (firewall control panel app - see attached screenshot), it'll show as if there are no third party firewall installed. Considering I'm still seeing connections being blocked by ESS (Setup - Network Protection - Troubleshooting wizard) as well as getting Windows firewall popups when something new wants to connect, it's pretty clear I'm ending up with two active firewalls on the same PC under these circumstances. Which is far from ideal. This is a very frequently occurring issue for me and it has also occurred on another PC as well. The only similarities between those PCs, have been the ESS version (v9), Windows version (10 Pro x64) and that they've been running Malwarebytes Anti-Malware resident protection. I have set up exception rules in both ESS and MBAM to exclude eachother, to avoid conflicts. It has also been hard to try to troubleshoot, since it is not a 100% recurring issue, but more like 50-70% of reboots (roughly).