Zone Alarm Pro

[John E]

Is there anybody else here who uses Zone Alarm Pro and who's finding that it interferes with their usage of CodeGuru?

On & off, this has been happening to me for several months. Whenever I come to CodeGuru (or even if I just click on a link to take me into a thread) I have to press 'Refresh' at least twice and it can take as long as 50 seconds for each page to be displayed.

I'm confident that the problem is due to ZA Pro because if I turn it off temporarily, the problem immediately goes away.

[John E]

I forgot to mention that I'm running ZA Pro under Windows XP Home Edition. XP's own firewall is currently turned off.

I'm thinking about ditching ZA Pro and just using XP's built-in firewall. Does anyone know if it's any good...?

[dglienna]

I only use it on the server, where AV software won't run. I've been using Windows Firewall since it came out, and think it is about the same in value.

[John E]

When this first started happening I emailed Zone Labs who told me to uninstall Zone Alarm and re-install. This did fix it for about a week or two but the problem came back.

Yesterday, I uninstalled ZA and installed the latest version. So far, it seems to be working - plus <SNIP>

[e_har]

I wouldn't recommend using Windows Firewall as it didn't flag those applications that was doing DLL injection.

As for ZA Pro, i would only recommend to users who didn't like to create a lot of rules. For those who like to create lots of rules, i would recommend Agnitum Outpost Pro(Commercial) or Jetico(Freeware). But Jetico would be a nuisance to normal users as it keep flagging a lot of stuff....some are false alarms.

[Mathew Joy]

I think ZA is a bad choice when it comes to performance. I use the free version, and I don't find any mention of performance increase in the Pro ver. I had some problems with DNS look ups especially immediately after I connect to the internet: anywhere from 2 to 10 mins, the initial DNS look up fails. After reading this post, I disabled and the problem vanished. Not only that, I saw that the network speed had increased from 3.6KB/s (the max I have seen) to 5.2KB/s once I shutdown ZA. I also frequently encountered the problem John had. I always thought it might be the problem with the ISP.

Apart from that the driver also seems to be problematic. Couple of years back when I was writing a server, I used to get BSOD at higher loads. Upon investigation, I found that its the ZA driver that is making the issue. When I mailed Zone Labs about it, they didn't seems to be enthusiastic about solving the problem.

I am using ZA with Win XP pro with the XP firewall turned off. Somehow I don't trust XP firewall to secure fully my laptop. So I switched to an easier firewall which turned out to be a bad choice. Despite of all these, I guess it is the program control and the fact that it is free, apart from easier user, which made it popular.

[John E]

The latest version of ZA Pro had been running fine until a few days ago when I needed to connect my laptop to the internet using my desktop PC as a gateway (in other words, networking the laptop to the desktop's LAN port). Previously, this had worked perfectly, although I haven't needed to use the feature for several months. Guess what.... it wouldn't work!! Zone Alarm Pro resolutely refused to let my laptop talk to the desktop machine. No indication was given that anything was wrong - it just wouldn't work.

Eventually, I uninstalled ZA Pro and re-installed with the 2 machines already networked together. This time, the network connection was set up correctly and everything worked fine.

The really annoying thing is that Zone Alarm gives you no errors or warning messages to help you figure out what's wrong. It just sits there, refusing to play ball until you uninstall it and re-install.

All things considered, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone....