Problems with UT2004 and Windows Firewall

nospam@example.com (Kevin Locke)
Sun, 20 Mar 2011 19:56:09 -0600
Troubleshooting

At our recent LAN Party, I ran into a problem playing Unreal Tournament 2004 (old, I know...) on Windows 7. After clicking "Join Game" or "Host Game" I am presented with the following error message:

Important
It has been determined that the Windows Firewall is enabled and that UT2004 is not yet authorized to connect to the internet. Authorization is required in order to use the online components of the game. Please refer to the README.TXT for more information.

There are a few different solutions that I came across. The first is to change permissions on a firewall policy list registry key, which doesn't appear to exist in Windows 7 (although it may solve the problem, if that is where UT2004 wants to write...). The other, which does work for me, is to edit the UT2004 configuration to ignore the Windows firewall. The complete solution was to edit ut2004.ini (stored in the System directory inside the UT2004 installation directory) and add the following lines:

[FireWall]
IgnoreSP2=1

Note that in many configurations on Vista/7, ut2004.ini is saved/loaded from underneath %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore (usually C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore) due to UAC File Virtualization. Edit ut2004.ini in the VirtualStore as it is loaded preferentially.