This probably affects other programs as well however for me it was trying to use the VMware vSphere Client to connect to a VMware vCenter server. For the life of me, I couldn't get it to connect. The vCenter services were all started, networking looked good, I could ping the vCenter server, everything that I tried didn't work.
After calling support, we determined that the workstation we were using was running Windows 7 and that the Windows firewall service was disabled. The support dude said that by default, Windows 7 will block all traffic when the firewall is disabled. Huh..
So the fix was to perform the following steps:
1) Enable the Windows Firewall service
2) Open up a command prompt and type: netsh advf set allp state off
That command will turn off the Windows firewall without disabling the service (so that it doesn't block traffic). It worked great for me and the vSphere Client could now connect!
