Vista Firewall Block All Port Accesses Out of the Blue

I was working as usual when I suddenly cannot access the internet. Everybody else seems to have no problem with it. All my LAN access seems to not work either. I remember I got this case sometime ago and a reboot fixed it, but I have many work open on the desktop that I refuse to just give up this time.

Some diagnostic later, the result, strangely, was :

• ping works, both LAN and internet.
  
• Any access to any port anywhere fail. I can not even ssh to server in LAN that I usually able to access.

I then checked out the running tasks and there seems to be nothing out of the ordinary. The next potential trouble-maker would be Windows Firewall. The troubleshooting went :

• Check the config, seems nothing wrong
• Turn it off, It works!
• Turn it on again, it still works ?!

What was that all about?. Well, at least now I know what to do when this thing happen again.