I’ve been using version 1.0 of GlassWire for the past few years, and I just recently upgraded to version 2.0. After a “successful” upgrade, I noticed a bunch of “outdated” Windows firewall rules for programs no longer on my system appear in the Windows registry for the Windows firewall. I removed these entries via cCleaner, but they reappear after reboot. Since I never had this occur prior to my GlassWire upgrade, I’m going to assume that the “new” GlassWire firewall sync process is introducing them at startup.
If my assumption is correct, is there a way to clear and refresh GlassWire’s firewall rules store with what is currently present in Windows’ version of the firewall rules? I’m guessing a clean install of GlassWire might accomplish that, but I would also rather not lose my GlassWire history if I can avoid doing so.
We used to let third party tools change our firewall rules but we had complaints that someone could change our rules and the user would never know. Now GlassWire resets its rules if they are deleted but we make sure and group them separately under “GlassWire”.
You don’t necessariliy have to do our “clean install” option to lose all GlassWire settings, but you could reset your firewall which would only lose your firewall settings.
Uninstall GlassWire in add/remove programs. Now go to the Windows Firewall control panel and choose “restore defaults”.
Reboot - IMPORTANT
Reinstall our latest version using the “reset firewall” option.
If that doesn’t solve it you could try this all again but this time try the “clean install” option in GlassWire along with “reset firewall”.
Please white list the programdata/glasswire folder with your cleaning software. Otherwise sometimes our files are deleted and GlassWire can have unusual behavior or switch to its free mode unexpectedly because its paid activation code will be deleted.
So, I did the uninstall, restored the Windows firewall to default settings, and rebooted. After reboot, I checked the registry for invalid firewall rules, and the system was clean … that’s good. However, after reinstalling GlassWire with the firewall option selected, the invalid firewall rules were immediately populated back into the system once the install completed. Again, in this context, invalid rules are ones that reference executables no longer present on my system. I think that pretty much confirms there is little, to no, clean up process in GlassWire. In the end, I had to resort to the “clean install” option, and sacrifice my history to prevent GlassWire from populating the outdated rules back into the registry.
Sorry … now that I’ve done the “clean install”, they’re no longer present on my system.
I suppose if you wanted to try and simulate it you could create a firewall rule in the Windows firewall that references some .exe present on the system, and then rename or delete the .exe that you called out in the rule. In my case, the missing .exe files were from software that was either uninstalled or upgraded to some new package version.
Is it true that there was no “reverse” firewall rule sync back to the Windows firewall rule set in GlassWire 1.0? That would account for why I didn’t notice the issue until GlassWire v2.0 got installed as cCleaner by default wouldn’t know anything about examining issues in GlassWire’s config. If that is all true, then I suspect that my GlassWire v1.0 firewall definitions built up a significant collection over the years of outdated rules as software was replaced/uninstalled, and the upgrade to v2.0 carried that collection forward during the upgrade. Under the same premise, GlassWire v2.0 now “syncs” those back to the Windows firewall when they are missing without validating the referenced .exes are present. As I said, I noticed it when running cCleaner since it looks for such references in Windows.
I realize that these extraneous rules are most likely harmless to the operation of both GlassWire and Windows, but I like to keep “junk” data from accumulating when I’m aware of it and can do something about it.
I agree that firewall rules for unused executables should be able to be removed.
But I wonder what happens if I reinstall software. When software is uninstalled would I lose my preferred settings for that program if I later reinstall it?
When I asked about this in the past I learned that it’s not so simple for GlassWire to tell if an executable is unused. It’s possible to accidentally remove a rule for an app that is still there, so that’s why we keep the rules.
The rules are all neatly organized under the “GlassWire” group.