i noticed that a recent undocumented change to group policy had re-enabled the windows firewall, which was also playing havoc with my software, so after a little thought on the matter, i decided to disable the service, inspite of them!
You can use a remote script, or login script to pull this off.
psservice /accepteula stop “Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)”
psservice /accepteula setconfig “Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)” disabled