The popups should not be completely blank. Try a Repair in the Control Panel. If that doesn’t work, then try a clean install.

There is no reason for the firewall to block trusted applications. Application Rules are only created for known programs (rules are created based on the whitelist/blacklist, and heuristic checks). On auto-decide mode, for unknown programs, it allows by default but blocks suspicious connections.

In that case, you could just modify the rule, instead of disabling the firewall…