Windows Firewall Rules Cleaner

I don't use a third party firewall. I just use Windows Firewall.

I find it to be quite good and easy to use. It is even good at manually adding rules.
The only negative I see is that there is no built-in way of cleaning redundant or duplicate Windows Firewall Rules, and over time these can build up.

The problem of redundant or duplicate Windows Firewall Rules becomes even more evident if you use portable applications and you get version revisions that are either in a different folder, different location or different file name.

From time to time, I have a look through the Windows Firewall Rules to see if there are any redundant or duplicate entries and manually remove them.

Recently, I have been searching for an application that can scan and remove them, but I haven't had much luck in finding a good one. There are probably all-on-one cleaners somewhere out there that have that functionality, but I don't know of one. That's where you knowledgable people come into the equation. Any suggestions are welcome.

PS:
I have found a PowerShell script posted on reddit that can crudely do it, but a nice little GUI application would be nice.

Hello, I'm not aware of any program to clean duplicate or redundant firewall rules, as you have noticed the default Windows firewall allows any software to add rules as part of their installation process.

Once you remove installed programs those rules stay there hindering your firewall performance.

People at reddit link you posted are correct, the script won't do its job as expected but it could be improved.

a nice little GUI application would be nice.

The easiest way (the one without using scripts) is to reset Windows firewall to factory defaults and then reinstall all networking programs to let them re-add their own rules to firewall.

However this while solving your problems may also require you to add some rules yourself later, for example rules for store apps and some windows programs might not all be restored after reset, manually added rules will be gone for ever.

Otherwise, you can also check out my windows firewall configuration HERE, at the moment it's still not fully released product but handling redundant rules is partially working.

zebal said:

Otherwise, you can also check out my windows firewall configuration HERE, at the moment it's still not fully released product but handling redundant rules is partially working.

Hi zebal.

I'll have a look at WindowsFirewallRuleset.
Thank you.