Windows7 firewall blocking access to my network scanner

Firstly as a new member let me say hi and thank you for allowing me to use this community.

Additionally let me apologise if this post is technically in the incorrect sub. It was a toss up between networking and the security sections but since it deals with my internal network rather than connections beyond my network or to the internet I thought it was more relevant to networking.

I recently upgraded to Windows 7 and the process for adding some of my older hardware has been an interesting one. The one that has got me stuck is being able to access my network scanners shared 'mailboxes' in order to retrieve my scans.

The product in question is a Xerox 6204 wide format printer/scanner. The installation process for the basic print server to run the 6204 as a network printer went fairly smoothly and appears to be working as expected. However the problem arises when I want to use the 6204's scan functionality. Scans are stored in 'mailboxes' on the 6204 and must be retrieved by a piece of software by Xerox called 'Wide Format Scan Service'. This program basically connects to the mailboxes via the IP address of the 6204 on the network and from there should allow me to download the scans to my Windows 7 machine. Unfortunately, in order to be able to connect to the mailboxes I am currently having to disable the Windows 7 firewall entirely.

I have tried adding the Wide Format Scan Service to the list of allowed programs which yields an 'Unable to connect to 6204' error. I have attempted to add the program to the inbound and outbound rules manually, although my experience with this is limited, again with the same error. As well as leaving the default settings of the wizard I have also tried to use the netstat technique to find out what ports the software was using and adding them to the specific ports in the properties of the rules - all without any success. This is perhaps because the port shown on my local address appears to differ each time?

At the moment I'm stuck at the point of having to run my Windows 7 installation without a firewall in order to use my wide format scanner, which is obviously an undesirable situation. If anyone can offer some help or advice on how I can resolve this issue it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again

Hi Barman

Thank you for your reply. I went ahead and tried out the applications you suggested, the first being the Firewall Control. Upon running it, it began popping up with notifications of programs/services, one of them being the Wide Format Scan Service which I proceeded to click "EnableAll" for. Unfortunately this didn't appear to have an effect and communicating with the scanner yielded the same error message.

Next up I installed the Comodo Firewall. After restarting to allow it to complete the installation I fired up the WFSS and set it to "Allow" when the notification popped up - Success, it appears to be allowing it now! Thanks for your help.

It appears either Windows Firewall was the culprit and/or my ability to implement it correctly. I must admit I have usually always stuck to the standard windows firewall in all previous OSes and haven't had any problems with it before, my only previous experience with 3rd party firewalls was with Zone Alarm a long while back on an old laptop but I found it a bit of a resource hog - hopefully Comodo will provide a better experience. Excuse my further questioning but are there any resources or guides which you can point me towards to give me better grasp on the Comodo Firewall.

Thanks again for your help

Thanks a lot mate Very much appreciate your help