I've just updated from version 9 to the latest version of ESS (10.0.386.0).
The previous issue I had whilst running the firewall in interactive mode no longer happens. I just hope that the issue was a known bug that ESET chose not to publicly acknowledge, but has been addressed by this latest release, otherwise it may re-appear in future releases.
@Marcos FYI - although the upgrade was successful, I still needed to manually run "ecmd.exe /registerav" to clear the Windows Defender/Firewall issues.