I always feel a twinge of trepidation when I make a non-standard configuration change to one of my machines. For instance, when I turned off the Windows Firewall service on my desktop a few months ago, a voice in my head told me I'd one day be installing software that assumes the firewall service is running, and that software would fail with a mysterious error.
Turns out that software is the Zune updater application.
It took some trial and error (three failed update attempts with error code 0x80070643), but once I turned on Windows Firewall, my Zune update finally succeeded.
I'd like to say I did a bunch of fancy sleuthing to track down the problem - but it was just blind luck and a hunch.
The voice in my head now tells me I should leave the service running, even though I have the firewall turned off, because there is a lot more software just waiting to spit out cryptic error codes in the future...
