ZoneAlarm 8 and 27 steps back to a working PC

Friday, September 12th, 2008

An update to ZoneAlarm Internet Security was released the other day. I could tell because my PC started nagging me with an intensity matched only by my four-year-old daughter when she wants to watch Fifi and the Flowertots during the football.

So I succumbed (to ZoneAlarm 8, not Fifi) and spent the next three hours trying to unpick the carnage that descended on my brand new Dell laptop, after the installation stalled midway through, leaving me with no other option but to reboot the PC.

Upon reboot I found myself in a ZoneAlarm no-man’s land: not quite in ZoneAlarm7, but not fully over the border into ZoneAlarm 8 either. The ZoneAlarm icon sits proudly in my System Tray, informing me the security is “up and running” but that the “UI is still initialising”. Every time I attempt to open the software, I’m met with a Windows error message informing me the application has crashed and Vista is trying to find a solution. Guess what? It doesn’t.

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