Cricket
02-27-2002, 11:30 PM
Hi all,
Just went through some fun times with the latest release of Zone Alarm. I've been using Zone Alarm for the past 2 years and haven't really had any problems with it until recently. I would usually just use the provided uninstaller to remove the program, run Reg Cleaner to clean the keys out of the Registry, clean out the Temp folders, run Disk Cleanup, Scandisk and Defrag then reboot and install the next release.
I've been doing it that way through the last 5 or 6 releases without incident, but finally ran into this...the last two weeks I noticed that browsing had become sluggish and I thought my USR 56K ISA modem was beginning to fail. Monday my wife told me she lost the ability to re-connect after the modem had dropped connection so I thought the modem had bit the dust. To check, I re-booted the PC and went to Control Panel> Modems and ran diagnostics. The modem responded like it was supposed to, so I fired up ZA and connected to our ISP and surfed around a bit. Things seemed fine so I let my wife continue her journeys through cyber space.
This morning, after being on-line for an hour or so I started to have problems connecting to web pages. I noticed the modem icon had stopped flashing whenever I hit a link or refresh. I thought "Okay, this modem finally died..." but then I noticed that the Zone Alarm icon would register activity. I tried hitting refresh a few more time and the same thing occured...modem icon didn't flash, but the Zone Alarm icon was showing activity. Puzzled, I logged off and turned off Zone Alarm and went to run modem diagnostics. Got a "port in use" message so I rebooted and ran modem diagnostics again. Modem checked out fine again. Okay, I thought "let's go on-line without Zone Alarm"...modem dialed ISP no problem and I could surf again. Enabled Zone Alarm...no joy, connection stopped cold. What's going on? Why was Zone Alarm stopping my connection? Was Zone Alarm corrupt? Virus? Trojan?
Shut down PC and went to work where I did a search for Zone Alarm problems. Found out that there is a problem when upgrading to latest version if you just use the uninstaller. It doesn't clean out everything that needs to go (no surprize there) and when the latest version was installed, conflicts or file corruption would occur over time.
Went to the Zone Labs website and found some information on how to really clean Zone Alarm off your system before you install the latest version. Must have worked as I'm on-line now with Zone Alarm version 2.6.362 enabled and it seems as if everything is okay...hope it stays that way.
Here's the webpage with the instructions to really clean Zone Alarm off your Win98 system: How to really remove previous versions of Zone Alarm (http://www.zonelabs.com/services/support_install_98.htm)
They have info for other Windows variants here (scroll all the way down the page): Clean Zone Alarm off other Windows variants (http://www.zonelabs.com/services/support_install.htm)
Sorry this is such a long post...I gotta work at being more concise :p.
:) Cricket
Just went through some fun times with the latest release of Zone Alarm. I've been using Zone Alarm for the past 2 years and haven't really had any problems with it until recently. I would usually just use the provided uninstaller to remove the program, run Reg Cleaner to clean the keys out of the Registry, clean out the Temp folders, run Disk Cleanup, Scandisk and Defrag then reboot and install the next release.
I've been doing it that way through the last 5 or 6 releases without incident, but finally ran into this...the last two weeks I noticed that browsing had become sluggish and I thought my USR 56K ISA modem was beginning to fail. Monday my wife told me she lost the ability to re-connect after the modem had dropped connection so I thought the modem had bit the dust. To check, I re-booted the PC and went to Control Panel> Modems and ran diagnostics. The modem responded like it was supposed to, so I fired up ZA and connected to our ISP and surfed around a bit. Things seemed fine so I let my wife continue her journeys through cyber space.
This morning, after being on-line for an hour or so I started to have problems connecting to web pages. I noticed the modem icon had stopped flashing whenever I hit a link or refresh. I thought "Okay, this modem finally died..." but then I noticed that the Zone Alarm icon would register activity. I tried hitting refresh a few more time and the same thing occured...modem icon didn't flash, but the Zone Alarm icon was showing activity. Puzzled, I logged off and turned off Zone Alarm and went to run modem diagnostics. Got a "port in use" message so I rebooted and ran modem diagnostics again. Modem checked out fine again. Okay, I thought "let's go on-line without Zone Alarm"...modem dialed ISP no problem and I could surf again. Enabled Zone Alarm...no joy, connection stopped cold. What's going on? Why was Zone Alarm stopping my connection? Was Zone Alarm corrupt? Virus? Trojan?
Shut down PC and went to work where I did a search for Zone Alarm problems. Found out that there is a problem when upgrading to latest version if you just use the uninstaller. It doesn't clean out everything that needs to go (no surprize there) and when the latest version was installed, conflicts or file corruption would occur over time.
Went to the Zone Labs website and found some information on how to really clean Zone Alarm off your system before you install the latest version. Must have worked as I'm on-line now with Zone Alarm version 2.6.362 enabled and it seems as if everything is okay...hope it stays that way.
Here's the webpage with the instructions to really clean Zone Alarm off your Win98 system: How to really remove previous versions of Zone Alarm (http://www.zonelabs.com/services/support_install_98.htm)
They have info for other Windows variants here (scroll all the way down the page): Clean Zone Alarm off other Windows variants (http://www.zonelabs.com/services/support_install.htm)
Sorry this is such a long post...I gotta work at being more concise :p.
:) Cricket