ZoneAlarm update causes lockups?

[Heretic Apostate]

ZoneAlarm was working well for me, aside from resulting in 5-minute boot times (and if anyone knows how to speed that up, I'd appreciate it; you'd think 640MB of RAM and 1.7GHz processor would be enough).

Now, however, since I allowed them to update ZoneAlarm last night, I've had troubles with my computer locking up, especially when going online. It's entirely traceable to ZoneAlarm, since when I turn off the firewall (ZA), I have no trouble getting online. Apparently, it's decided the best way to lock out the hackers is to make sure that no one can use the computer.

So, anyone know of a fix for this problem? Or know of a good, freebie firewall I can download? I have to be able to surf the net, but I don't want to have to pay for it.

 

[CrusaderX]

I noticed this thread on Google, especially the following post:

I used 5 for a few days but decided to downgrade to 4.5. It was causing
problems with my computer (Winxp) like hanging aka system lockups,
programs unable to connect to the internet, etc...

The page with the old version is here

http://download.zonelabs.com/bin/free/information/znalm/zaReleaseHistory.html

If you want to completely remove the new version from your system,
change the uninstall shortcut by locating it in Start >Programs > Zone
Labs > uninstall Zone Alarm. Right click on it and select properties
then change the path from

"C: \ Program Files\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\zauninst.exe"

to

"C: \ Program Files\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\zauninst.exe" /clean

This gets rid of everything.

I'm also getting hangups with ZoneAlarm 5.0, so I think I'm going to uninstall it and go back to the 4.5 version.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

ZoneAlarm was working well for me, aside from resulting in 5-minute boot times (and if anyone knows how to speed that up, I'd appreciate it; you'd think 640MB of RAM and 1.7GHz processor would be enough).

Now, however, since I allowed them to update ZoneAlarm last night, I've had troubles with my computer locking up, especially when going online. It's entirely traceable to ZoneAlarm, since when I turn off the firewall (ZA), I have no trouble getting online. Apparently, it's decided the best way to lock out the hackers is to make sure that no one can use the computer.

So, anyone know of a fix for this problem? Or know of a good, freebie firewall I can download? I have to be able to surf the net, but I don't want to have to pay for it.

My aunt and her friend currently got a new PC and since they had (the first time they ever went online with it) a virus on the PC (Sasser), a friend of them gave them some software to fix it. They also installed Zonealarm.

Unfortunately, they still needed some help, so I removed the virus and I had to fight Zonealarm.
I didn`t find the interface that intuitive at first (but maybe this is because I am used to a AtGuard - which seems unavailable these days), but I was able to figure out the reason for its blocking.
Somewhere you can find an option to change settings for different programs. Look for your browser and any other software that might need to access the web and order Zonealarm to allow traffic from this program.
Unfortunately I can`t remember where it was, nor do I know which version of Zonealarm my aunt uses. I guess you have to search a bit for the exact location of these options - or wait for someone more familiar with Zonealarm.
(I kinda hate it. We have our own network in our home, and the girl in th neighbouroom also uses ZoneAlarm, and it seemed to cause problems in the whole net...)

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[EricNoah]

I just installed it a day or two ago and am not having any problems thus far.

 

[Heretic Apostate]

Okay, I'm downgraded.

Any ideas on how to speed up my bootup time? I'm literally taking something like 5 minutes to start up. (Thus the pain of having to reboot my computer four times this morning...)