I recently installed the current free version of ZoneAlarm, which is for those of you who don’t know a personal firewall application. I had used older versions some time ago and though it could help me resolve current problems,..
The problem I was having was that FireFox was hanging while I was playing Zynga poker, causing me to loose a shit load of play money. Now I was planning to try real money online poker so you can see that I was majorly concerned. Loosing $5000 play money is nothing but when your playing for real money you do not want this to happen.
So I figured that one possibility was that I was being pinged to death, ( Ping flooding in order to deny me the service, see DOS attacks) and decided to use ZoneAlarm to detect and block this.
Sure enough I was getting unsolicited pings etc but no more than the usual background noise one expects these days, however that was just the start of my problems. ZoneAlarm itself became a problem! First of all there’s the usual malarkey in-re configuring the damn thing, then it starts messing with Global hosts, preventing SpybotSD from doing a full immunisation,1078 global hosts could not be immunised until after ZA was removed. Then it hogs my CPU resources using on average 25% of available threads, which led me on to the REAL problem: Spybot’s TeaTimer (resident protection from malware and spyware) was working overtime and chewing vast amounts of memory, why? Because I had too many damn applications running; Messenger, Iplayer, Skype etc. With ZoneAlarm running as well 100% of my available resources were being used!
So I fixed that, but then Windows Live Messenger would NOT connect. I ran a diagnostic, no connection problems. I ran the trouble shooter and it detected a problem with the hosts file but would NOT complete, it hung at ‘key ports’ preventing the fix, more ZoneAlarm interference I expect because again after removing ZoneAlarm the problem magically resolved itself. BUT That not the end of it,..
As a parting present from ZA a windows application window opens on my desktop on reboot after removal, ‘cpes_clean_launcher.exe’ scaring the shit out of me. I googled it and found a guy who couldn’t get rid of it, others who feared it was a trojan dropper but no definitive article. Not even on ZoneAlarm’s own website! Anyways my system scanned clean and ‘cpes_clean_launcher.exe’ did not reappear on reboot so all is well. But its a big thumbs down for ZoneAlarm from me, more trouble than its worth!
