Let's take a quick minute and direct our attention to those three firewall profiles, so that we can discuss what they mean. You see, every time your Windows computer makes a connection to a network, and if your firewall is enabled, the firewall will flag that network for one of these three firewalling profiles. You have probably seen the pop-up window that often appears when connecting to a new network, asking you whether this is a home, work, or public network. Sometimes computers are configured not to ask you this, and then they typically just lump all new networks into the Public category. The service in Windows that handles this distinction between networks is called Network Location Awareness (NLA).
When ...
