As the Subject states - Hardened Mode (HM) set to Aggressive blocks the acs.exe (Outpost Firewall Pro service), this has only started today VPS 140328-0 on avast free 9.0.2016 and XP Pro SP3.
I have had HM set on aggressive for some time, yet on boot this morning, I noticed the outpost firewall tray icon was greyed out, then windows popped up your firewall is not running; all of this was before the HM alert popup even reared its head.
When HM did alert it the popup was up and gone so damn quick I couldn’t click the add exclusion. This has been mentioned many times the popup duration for this should follow the Popup Duration for alerts as this isn’t an informative popup (duration set at 2 seconds) but an alert popup, which I have set to 7 seconds.
I had to manually start the outpost firewall pro service (from services.msc) and catch the HM popup to exclude it.
Note: I have just tested this on my win7 SP1 netbook with the same avast version, VPS and same avast settings and no HM alert, strange (?).