When the Windows Firewall Service is disabled I cannot remote desktop (RDP) to the machine

Solution 1:

Starting from Windows Vista disabling the Windows Firewall service is not doing what it did in Windows XP, because of the introduction of Windows Filtering Platform.

What is more this practice is discouraged and explicitly not supported by Microsoft as stated here.

One of the proper ways of disabling Windows Firewall completely (on all profiles) is to issue this command in an administrative cmd:

netsh advfirewall set AllProfiles state off

If said computer is in a domain, as your post indicates, this may not even work at all - the Firewall will get reconfigured on a GP update if there is a GPO that configures it. If you have administrative access to this computer you can run:

gpresult /h report_computer.html /scope:computer

to get a detailed report of applied GPOs to your computer. Windows Vista+ Firewall is usually configured by Computer Configuration/Windows Settings/Security Settings/Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. However this might be also configured, for example, by a startup script issuing netsh commands, it all depends on the domain administrator's methods.