Zone Alarm Et. Al.

[Seekermeister]

About every other time that I boot, zlclient.exe and vsmon.exe, both of which belong to Zone Alarm, never cease to stop running, and since they can't be terminated with the Task Manager, I find myself rebooting too often. If I don't find a solution to this quickly, I'm going looking for another firewall. Any ideas?

 

[Schadenfroh]

Look for another firewall and when you remove Zone Alarm, use /clean at the end of its uninstall shortcut or it will never remove its "true vector" stuff. See my sig for other firewall options. The recent Zone Alarm releases have not made me very happy, even though ZA was my first FireWall.

 

[Seekermeister]

Which of those firewalls do you prefer?

 

[Schadenfroh]

I used my nvidia firewall on my nForce3 Ultra. Comodo Personal Firewall "seems" to be the best choice for firewalls at the moment (in addition to your router's hardware firewall), although I have never tried it.

 

[Seekermeister]

I've now got Kerio installed, since it was already in my archive. If it starts giving me problems, then I will try Comodo.

 

[Staver]

a good Microsoft service utility called uphclean.exe will kill all programs so the registry can be unloaded.

 

[Lemon law]

Any decent firewall requires configuring---special custom rules to allow the various software you want to permit to access the internet. And such firewalls also
require some monitoring as you change your software---all of which requires---gasp---reading the fine print in the help files.

Although I have not tried it---I do note that comodo does have a support forum to aid the newbie in getting comodo configured. With both the comodo and jelico
firewalls drawing high ratings--and also drawing some complaints about configuring complexity---a support forum is a plus.

I mention that because when I neglected updating my firewall settings and then later noted my firewall was failing various online checks with firewall testers like shields up---I seriously considered going comodo. But got lazy and just reconfigured the devil I did know to get passing marks.

 

[Seekermeister]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
Look for another firewall and when you remove Zone Alarm, use /clean at the end of its uninstall shortcut or it will never remove its "true vector" stuff. See my sig for other firewall options. The recent Zone Alarm releases have not made me very happy, even though ZA was my first FireWall.

Perhaps I did it wrong, but while defragging, I got alot of .rdb files, which I got curious about, and looked it up on fileext.com. It appears that these are true vector files from Zone Alarm. I went to the properties of the uninstall file and added /clean to the target window, but I think that you may have had something else in mind.

What is the best way to cleanup the mess?

 

[Seekermeister]

Nevermind, the .rdb files are Retrospect Disk Backups.

 

[Autocrosser]

I had similar problems with Zone Alarm recently. It would essentially lock up my system when it would try to update/download files. Since it would lock up, it would also lock up everything else. I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what was wrong.

I removed Zone Alarm and am using the nVidia firewall and Kapersky AV.

Now I need to find a good spam/phishing filter.

 

[irishScott]

Comodo is great. It's fairly easy to configure on a basic level, but has lotws of nice advanced features. It's also lighter-weight than ZA. I've been using it for the last month of so now (replaced my bloated McAffee Firewall).

 

[Seekermeister]

autocrosser,

If you use Opera, the latest version has builtin phishing protection. Firefox has spoofstick. If you use IE, I can't help.

 

[Conky]

Another vote for Comodo here. I had problems with my new build (fresh install of XP and all that) and my older version of ZoneAlarm giving me bluescreens right after installing the program.

I decided to try Comodo Firewall Pro and must say I am very impressed with it. And it's free. Free is good. Goodbye ZoneAlarm!

 

[SuPrEIVIE]

i also went from ZA (a rebadged ezfirewal) to Comodo and it seems alot better, but it seems a little to rigid even when you apply rules, my utorrent for example never has uploading activity anymore with Comodo running, and i play the classic game Age of Conquerors, however this game seems virtually incompatible with this firewall even if i set the rules because i cannot get to those annoying popups so my game freezes. it brings up popups all the time even if you ask it to remember the answer YES which is annoying,

anybody use those related programs without a problem? if so help me please

 

[Seekermeister]

Kerio is now gone. It caused a BSOD with fwdriv.sys. So I just installed Comodo. I hope that this installation lasts longer.

 

[Seekermeister]

I'll say one thing for Comodo, it popped an alert that SpeedFan was calling home through svchost.exe, which neither ZA or Kerio had done. In fact, it was not even apparent in the Task Manager. One problem that I'm about to try to solve is that it appears that Avast is being blocked from updating, and I never got any kind of alert on it.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
autocrosser,

If you use Opera, the latest version has builtin phishing protection. Firefox has spoofstick. If you use IE, I can't help.

Err.. IE7 has built-in phishing protection. It works too, I test it whenever I get phishing emails. BTW if anyone wants a short phish-education tutorial video for non-geeks, I can email you a narrated Windows Media Player screencapture movie. I didn't quite finish it but it's a start.

 

[neutralizer]

I'm using the last version of Kerio before it got bought by Sunbelt. It works great.

 

[Seekermeister]

I think that I still have an old version of Kerio in my archive. If anything goes wrong with Comodo, I may try it.

 

[TheoPetro]

I just put comodo and kaspersky on the network at work and have been really happy with how they have turned out so far. Comodo was really easy to configure and after running through what needs to be done w/ it in "learn" mode it seems to be working fine. The "trusted zone" feature is pretty awesome. Overall a great firewall for the price FREE! Kaspersky would be better but one of its processes (cant remember which one I wanna say avp.exe?) is eating up a ton of processer power. Overall with those two and spybotS&D I feel fairly secure.

 

[Seekermeister]

I agree that Kaspersky is great for security, but it is too much of a system hog for me. When my Avast demo expires, I'm going to get Nod32.

 

[40sTheme]

Hmm, I have a question.
Why is vsmon running when I do not have Zone Alarm? I have never downloaded, bought, etc Zone Alarm, but vsmon is there...

 

[Seekermeister]

Are you the only person with access to your computer?

 

[40sTheme]

Yes, it's my computer in my room, and there are no other instances of anything Zone Alarm on my computer.

 

[Ryland]

I have Comodo running on my laptop which I use when I travel which means unsecured hotel networks and I have never had a problem.