fire wall issues

I just got a new computer... well new to me it was someone elses at the company before and everything worked fine. Im trying to connect my outlook email to our exchange server, it's having problems, usually the solution is to turn off the windows firewall. if i go through control panel to the windows firewall i can turn it off there, but when i look in windows security panel it shows that the firewall is still on, ive already uninstalled the antivirus software from the computer (it was norton 2009 and we now have norton 2010) so it cant be a firewall from that, any ideas as to why it wont turn off when i select it to be turned off. I do have administrator rights on this computer. and i can connect to the server that hosts our exchange server just fine to access various other drives