Getting the Google Earth Plug-In to Work on Windows 8.1 for Radwin R-Planner

My hard drive crashed on my laptop on Sunday night, with a big bid due Monday. Upon replacing it, I inevitability had to load in all my software to get back to being in a working environment. Thank heavens for Dropbox and Box.com, FYI. 🙂

I installed Google Earth Pro (why wouldn’t you, it’s free now) and then moved on to my radio planning tools. One of them, Radwin R-Planner, which is Google Earth Plug-In based, wouldn’t work for some reason. I have been fighting that battle for two days, but am happy to report that I found a fix, at least for me.

It seems that for some reason on my Windows 8.1 setup, a fresh install, when I installed the Google Earth Plug-In, it didn’t set up any of the firewall rules .. for the plug-in.

So, here’s what I had to do:

Add 2 Windows Firewall Allowed Programs to the exception list:

1. geplugin.exe is added as a firewall exception for ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Google Earth\plugin\geplugin.exe’
2. googleearth.exe is added as a firewall exception for ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Google Earth\client\googleearth.exe’