Filezilla is working, but shows deactivated...

[MarauderKy]

Hello all,
I've recently done a fresh install of xampp 1.7.3 on a fresh windows xp sp3 machine. Everything went well, and everything was running fine. I secured the xampp pages, MySql, PhpMyAdmin, and Filezilla, and all items continued to work fine. Apache, MySQL, and FileZilla are all running as services, and I can access all of them. The only item that shows as deactivated on my status page since the installation was SMTP, because I'm not using it. That is, until yesterday. Yesterday, I signed on and checked the status page, and it states that both the SMTP and the FTP service are deactivated. However, FileZilla shows as running in the control panel, started in the services, the port check shows the port open for the service, and I can access the ftp server both locally and from outside my lan...so it must be working.
The security page also states that the ftp server is not running or is blocked by a firewall, and is "unknown" (yellow), when it previously read "secure" (green). I fail to see why it's lost track of the ftp service, since I haven't made any configuration changes since I got it working several days ago. I've gone thru many pages in the forum, and also did a search for "deactivated", and looked at all of those posts, but most of them seemed to refer to problems with MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, PHP, or SMTP. My error logs show nothing abnormal.
Can anybody tell my what the status and security pages use to determine whether a service is activated, or not? What should I look for...and where? Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I really like the package.
Thanks,
Tom