control panel options greyed out

Ah - You must have Norton AV or McAfee installed, those both remove access to the firewall. To find out which AV is taking over, open "Turn Windows Firewall on or off" and it will tell you in big red letters which app has usurped control from you. Then delete the blazes out o f that app, and use Eset NOD32 Antivirus (Not Smart Security) instead, which does not do that.

OR, you can open whatever AV is doing it, and change the firewall settings from there, except that all of those apps that install 3rd party FWs are very not user friendly. Only the Windows Firewall is.

thank you for your help