Now why we have to do this in this manner when most of us have our own antivirus and firewall options is beyond me.
If they won't let you run a certain kinds of processes, updates or cmdlets without activating windows Firewall, that's called forcing you to use their firewall.
Unfortunately some programs (specifically the web based programs my company uses for remote employees, Brother Printer administrative programs, and others) are blocked by Windows Firewall, so it's necessary to deactivate it in order to use your (or at least my) program(s).
Norton installed, and in fact if you look it up, you'll find that Norton Requires it to be active in order to Run, if you turn it off Norton won't work.
But if you create a shortcut to the services, you can turn on the Firewall service at your convenience to run updates, and stop it again the same way when finished updating.
You are perfectly within your rights to go back to your previous version of Win until you feel comfortable with moving to 10.