Can't Start Windows Defender Firewall or Change Settings

I got a notification at the bottom of the screen on my desktop computer saying Firewall had been turned off click here to fix. It opened up Windows Defender Firewall under Control Panel. But I can't get anything to work. Click on "use recommended settings", nothing happens. Also clicked on "change notifications" and "Turn Defender On" and nothing happens.

So I tried to open services.msc to restart it, and I see that all my services have abbreviated names and under description say "failed to read description error code 2". I don't know which one is Firewall because it doesn't say Firewall. The only one I see in the list with a recognizable name is "WinDefend" but when I right-click, start, stop, etc are all grayed out.

I

Did you installed any third-party Firewall?

Please open the Command Prompt by typing cmd.exe into Start Menu, right-click on Cmd.exe, and open it as an administrator.

Execute following command to reset Windows Firewall to default.

Code:

netsh advfirewall reset

Once pressing Enter, all the firewall settings are now reset to their default values.

No, I do not have any 3rd party firewall or security on this computer. I just did the reset above, and I get an error: an error occured while attempting to contact the Windows Defender Firewall Service. Make sure that the service is running and try your request again.

I can't turn Defender on.

Execute attached registry file to add and enable Windows Firewall service.

If this does not work repair install Windows 10.

Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade

So if I do a refresh it will uninstall all of the non-windows programs? Such as Photoshop, Office, Firefox, etc?

You will get to keep your personal files and installed programs.

It worked! I did the repair install and everything came back up. Firewall is on, and the buttons to turn on and off work. Under services.msc, all of them are listed with their proper names and descriptions and the ability to right-click and restart or stop a service is not grayed out. It appears to be back to normal!

Thank you for the help.

We are glad to hear your issue has been resolved, thank you for letting us know that all is now well!

There's a glitch that I discovered. My programs are still working, but none of the start menu shortcuts in the tiles are blank and the apps don't appear in the list. I went to the application's exe file and clicked "unpin from start" and then "pin to start menu" but they still don't show up there. So I effectively have no shortcuts and have to go into c:\program files\... to find and open them. How can I re-sync the shortcuts?

Maybe re-registering the Start Menu will help use the batch script to do that.