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!
This is exactly what happened to me today, are you sure the file cpes_clean.launcher.exe is from zonealarm?
ReplyDeleteAs sure as I can be, that is to say not 100% certain, but I have had no subsequent problems.
ReplyDeleteSame thing - ZoneAlarm is a big mess. I had it on my Win98 system years ago - it was great! Figured I'd give it a try again... nothing worked. It wouldn't ask me if programs were OK when they ran, I couldn't access any shares or print over my network or get to the internet... nothing. The Help info is lame. "Add the IP address" is all they offer... well, duh. That's not a trouble-shooting step, that the normal setup. Uninstalled and that same program was added to the RUN key in the registry. Dumb. Now, with it gone, I still can't access the internet........ It's been an hour since that last bit - found an uninstall log from that dang program. Seems it wasn't able to delete two files. Had to boot to DOS to rename VSDATANT.SYS and VSCONFIG.XML (c:\windows\system32) as they were being used by the System... thus why they couldn't be deleted. Booted back into XP, no errors and no problems. Everything is back to working.
ReplyDeleteSame issue here...
ReplyDeleteHadn't I stumbled upon this useful post I'd never would have thought of ZA being responsible for this. Uncool "parting present" as stated.
All the more, I had the same critical issues with ZA as stated by a previous comment (No access to shares and stuff like that.
ZA used to be really good. Getting it settled down after a fresh install on Win 98 / 2000 / XP was a bit tedious with all the popups, but once you had saved your most common responses it was really awesome. The only drawback was the gaming aspect, where turning it off was the only way to reliably stay connected to a server online. This latest version is absolute rubbish. I have no idea what they have done to this once excellent piece of kit.
ReplyDelete