Hi, I'm new on this forum, it's a pleasure to meet you, I was wondering if you could help me find a solution to my problem, you see, TinyWall is preventing me from using my browsers and it's probably blocking all outgoin conections on my computer, regardless of exceptions.
For context: I got a new second hand computer in April, cause the one I had before got damaged due to power outages last year, installed windows 7, which is the same OS I used to have (I know I should probably update to a newer version, but currently I only have 2gb of RAM and I don't want my computer to be too slow), installed all of my old programs, with TinyWall being one of the first ones I installed (I've been using it for a few years, and never had to deal with any problems before), and everything was working fine: I could use my browsers and TinyWall blocked everything else that wasn't on the list of exceptions, but I could manually add new ones when needed (I mean, I still can, but it doesn't seem to do anything).
The problem started a week ago, my browsers became unable to connect to internet, with Chrome showing either ERR_NETWORK_ACCESS_DENIED or ERR_QUIC_PROTOCOL_ERROR and Internet Explorer showing 'This page cannot be displayed'. I tried removing them from TinyWall's exception list and adding them again but it doesn't change anything. The funny thing is that, when I try browsing and then I immediatly open tinywall's connections window and check 'show blocked apps (in the last 5 mins)', the list comes out empty, as if TinyWall wasn't responsible of blocking their internet access:
In fact, there are opened ports for Chrome:
But no established connections:
This all changes when I change TinyWall from 'Normal mode' to 'Allow outgoing' mode; if I do, then I can surf the web just fine:
But after I go back to 'Normal mode', the connections end again. And I mean, I could just keep TinyWall on 'Allow outgoing' mode, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of having TinyWall installed?
I know the problem is TinyWall because I tried unistalling and then reinstalling it - after uninstalling it I checked and could use my browsers fine, then I installed it again and it seemed like the problem got solved cause I could still use my bowsers while TinyWall was on 'Normal mode', but the problem came back after I rebooted.
I have no idea what could have caused TinyWall to start behaving this way; the only thing I remember doing to it was running it as Admin, cause I thought I needed to add Avast antivirus to the exception list and I tried to do the 'Whitelist by window' thing with TinyWall, but found I couldn't click on Avast's window unless I ran TinyWall as Admin. Besides that, the only other thing I did that day was installing MS Office 2010 and defragging. But regardless of the cause, shouldn't it have been fixed after reinstalling? I mean, I used Revo to uninstall it and removed all traces form the registry and program files, and I didn't do the run as Admin thing again this time...
So, I'm stumped, do you guys know anything I could try to fix this or should I start looking for another firewall?