SOLVED: not starting as a service and black screen on extenders

[Gog]

I'm running 7.1.9 on win2k8 with a HDHR and 2x Hauppauge 950 USB and 2xHD300

I usually disable windows update (how they justify automatic reboots on a server is beyond me...) but I forgot after a brand new install. One night it installed a truckload of updates, rebooted and after that the service wouldn't start. There were a lot of updates so I kinda let it be and started sage manually after each reboot. The error was: "service did not start in a timely fashion" The weird thing is that the default is 30 seconds but the error would pop up immediately.

The error in the event logs:

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
<Provider Name="Service Control Manager" Guid="{555908d1-a6d7-4695-8e1e-26931d2012f4}" EventSourceName="Service Control Manager" />
<EventID Qualifiers="49152">7009</EventID>
<Version>0</Version>
<Level>2</Level>
<Task>0</Task>
<Opcode>0</Opcode>
<Keywords>0x8080000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2013-12-15T05:16:08.048439100Z" />
<EventRecordID>11706</EventRecordID>
<Correlation />
<Execution ProcessID="452" ThreadID="2376" />
<Channel>System</Channel>
<Computer>SAGEHP</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
- <EventData>
<Data Name="param1">30000</Data>
<Data Name="param2">SageTV</Data>
</EventData>
</Event>

Tonight, I started to get black screen from my HD300s. Boot is fine, connection to the server happens normally but after that, blank screen.

I figured I'd bite the bullet and reinstall Sage. At the first start, it complained that my license was not a v7 and I remembered that I had been lazy last time and instead of digging in my old stuff for my v7 license, just installed the unlocked v6 version of the v7 execs.

Turns out that when I put in my v7 license, SageService starts without a hitch...

As for the black screen, it looks like a windows update from yesterday turned the windows firewall back on and it was eating part of SageTV's traffic.

So basically, it took me 3 hours to turn off the firewall

Hopefully this post will save someone the trouble...

G