After looking more closely at Norton’s documentation, I need to qualify my earlier suggestion of Windows Settings Mode.
My initial thought was based on Norton’s wording that Smart Firewall will “follow your Windows Firewall settings,” which made it sound like Windows Firewall could be used to manage the traffic rules while Norton remained enabled. The fuller documentation, however, specifically says Windows Settings Mode follows Windows Firewall settings “for new network connections.” Norton also separately documents Program Control as the mechanism for application-specific Allow/Block decisions.
So I don’t think we can say with confidence that a custom Windows Firewall outbound Block rule for one of your legacy programs will be enforced by Norton in Windows Settings Mode. That’s why I asked whether you had actually tried it.
Given what happened with your existing Norton Block rules, I completely understand why you’re not willing to turn Smart Firewall back on just to experiment. And I don’t think we should assume that the recent Norton update caused the Block → Allow change either. The timing makes it worth investigating, but we don’t yet know what actually caused those settings to change.
So, at this point, I’d call Windows Settings Mode something potentially worth exploring, but not a confirmed solution for your particular use case.
And I agree with you – not wanting to turn Smart Firewall back on just to experiment. Given that you found your manually configured Block settings had changed to Allow, I can understand why you’re not willing to put it back into service until you have confidence in what happened.
I also agree with your larger point: if you deliberately configured programs to Block, discovering later that those settings had changed to Allow is a serious enough issue to undermine confidence in the firewall. We don’t yet know what caused the change — the timing makes a Norton update worth investigating, but we shouldn’t claim that’s the cause without evidence.
My suggestion of Windows Settings Mode was based on the wording in Norton’s UI, but after looking at the fuller documentation, I agree it isn’t something I can tell you will provide the Windows Firewall program-level blocking you’re looking for. So I wouldn’t ask you to trust it without testing it, either.
I gave you advice that turned out to be insufficiently supported, and I’m owning that.
