Solved WLM 2011 being blocked by firewall

[Alejandro85]

Hi, I need a little help with an issue when trying to use MSN 2011. I've enabled the Windows built-in firewall and I'm not able to login directly into it. It reports error code "80072efd" and never gets past the user/password screen.

I know that Windows firewall is the offending program, because if I disable it or return to the default of allowing outbound connections it works perfectly. Problem is that I don't want to keep firewall disabled but instead open just the bare minimum ports for that specific program to work. So far all I've tried wasn't effective and now I can chat only if firewall is disabled.

Any ideas? Has anyone some info on what ports/protocols needs to be opened?
Thanks!!

 

[Alejandro85]

OK, solved it myself.

It turns out that, contrary to common sense, I need to add exceptions for 3 programs to make MSN 2011 work with a firewall. I added rules to allow TCP traffic on all ports to those 3 executables:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Windows Live\WLIDSVC.EXE
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Contacts\wlcomm.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Messenger\msnmsgr.exe

And that's it. Now MSN connects and works normally. What I still miss is to know what ports exactly does it needs, so that I can apply more restrictive exceptions.