What does NTSTATUS 0xC0220036 (STATUS_FWP_TOO_MANY_SUBLAYERS) mean?

STATUS_FWP_TOO_MANY_SUBLAYERS

The filtering engine cannot allocate another sublayer

Sublayers group filters and define relative ordering. This status points to policy-object exhaustion or a leaking policy manager that creates sublayers instead of reusing stable ones.

Enumerate registered sublayers and their owning providers before adding another one. Repeated creation without corresponding cleanup can exhaust the supported sublayer set even when individual registrations are valid.

What to inspect

• Enumerate sublayers by provider.
• Delete stale policy objects left by old versions of the product.
• Reuse a fixed provider and sublayer design instead of creating per-connection sublayers.

References for STATUS_FWP_TOO_MANY_SUBLAYERS

• Microsoft Open Specifications: NTSTATUS values
• Microsoft: Windows Filtering Platform
• Microsoft: WFP error codes