VW00

@Marcos
He is experiencing the same firewall interactive prompt issue many here complained before. Same issue, except people don't know how to describe it properly. And he is correct, when this happens, sometimes when you reboot the system you see the prompt before logging off and the way he mentioned he can hear the sound but no popup is the same I described in another topic.
Almost every issue I read regarding the firewall prompt or alert not showing is the same issue, but just described differently by different users. It's very unlikely that so many different ESET users on different computers have the same issue, unless this is a bug with the software. I have read over 100 topics now here in the forums, some old, some new of people describing the same issue, basically no prompt to allow or deny a program when using the firewall interactive mode.
I think I described in fairly detail how to reproduce this.

@Marcos
He is experiencing the same firewall interactive prompt issue many here complained before. Same issue, except people don't know how to describe it properly. And he is correct, when this happens, sometimes when you reboot the system you see the prompt before logging off and the way he mentioned he can hear the sound but no popup is the same I described in another topic.
Almost every issue I read regarding the firewall prompt or alert not showing is the same issue, but just described differently by different users. It's very unlikely that so many different ESET users on different computers have the same issue, unless this is a bug with the software. I have read over 100 topics now here in the forums, some old, some new of people describing the same issue, basically no prompt to allow or deny a program when using the firewall interactive mode.
I think I described in fairly detail how to reproduce this.

I changed laptops over the years, which means I reinstalled ESET fresh and created new rules as they prompted on new devices. And while now I probably do have older rules, I try to delete them, but I don't think rules are the issue or the numbers of them.
Does the reset windows layout also reset the ESET firewall prompt? If yes, I guess that could solve one of the described issues.
Now the prompt not showing, like I said, it's not hard to emulate. For example a php.exe process that needs to access something remotely will usually cause the issue, just a simple CURL code could be triggered multiples to cause it. Or NodeJS or most things that connect to the internet from the command line or its own process. This happens when you have other security prompts at the same time from other software, or I noticed the issue is more triggered if you are running some specific software made in Java or Kotlin that also prompts something to the user, or if ESET wants to display multiple prompts from different processes, there seems to be some stacking issue, if only 1 needs to show, the issue is fine, but if multiple things try to prompt as the same time, and ESET has to show one by one, the last one will never show.
I think in the past you could kill a process from ESET tools. Now if this was removed for security reasons, it should be added back for the firewall, maybe lock that option under the ESET admin password, but I just had this issue 4 times today alone.
Each time, I see for example php.exe as running in ESET, but it's not actually running in the Windows Task manager. Killing that process and restarting it would force ESET to show a firewall prompt again, but you can't unless you reboot Windows.
While this would not fix the issue of the prompt now showing on the GUI, at least it's an option which would be welcome vs having to restart the whole operating system.
There is something in ESET that makes the prompt not show at sometimes or it's hidden, and since the process in ESET is frozen forever in time. And if this helps the new dark mode seems to be even more conflicting. I love the new dark mode, but I had to turn it off because the firewall prompt tends to work even worse in that mode. I'm not asking ESET to fix the GUI prompt issue which does not display or is invisible that people complain since I know what is causing it or when, but at least give some tools from the ESET interface to see which connections are pending or a log to be able to manually accept, deny or maybe kill the process entirely. The problem is that when this happens, there is nothing you can do. No way to force a new firewall prompt and no way to kill the background process in ESET.
Someone at ESET should seriously investigate or try to improve the way this works, since you can find a lot of complaints about this online and people cannot really replicate it every single time which makes it hard to debug, but the issue is real over multiple Windows versions and ESET versions over the years. I also have ESET in another systems, and the same is true, so it's not unique to a specific installation or computer.
Speaking of old rules, they accumulate a lot which might be an issue for the reason that ESET does not like Windows apps installed using the MSIX packager, like those installed from the Windows Store, or Office 365. The reason is that it considers each update as a new process since the installation path and .exe changes every time.
ESET firewall should instead try to use the Windows Execution Alias for those .exe which Microsoft has. With the execution alias, the exe can be recognized and run from the command line with the name regardless of where the application is installed. It's very annoying with new apps, even Microsoft Office to have to save the new rules almost every week when there is a new update. This means you end up with more and more old rules that you need to delete. Any app from the Windows Store can't be saved as a rule because it keeps changing.