ZoneAlarm and Windows Slowdowns
Over the last few weeks, my otherwise snappy computer has been very slow when starting up and starting programs. During startup, you can sit and watch the system tray icons pop up one by one - with about a minute or so between each program starting. When starting any program, there is a delay up to a minute. Also, when doing simple tasks in Explorer, sometimes I'd get a file locking error because I would be clicking on an icon before Explorer had a chance to fully render it's icon. I thought it was a virus, or trojan program - however, numerous scans turned up empty. Knowing that any program took up to a minute to start, I tried out an experiment. I kept Task Manager up while starting a few different programs. In each case, a process called vsmon.exe would appear, using up just 5-10% of the CPU, but still sticking around near the top of Task Manager when sorting by CPU usage. Invariably, this process would disappear once the program finally started. A little poking around, and I find that this process is actually my ZoneAlarm virus scanner - apparantly scanning each program as it starts. ZoneAlarm had been bugging me lately to install an update, so I did so. Everything is running much smoother now, although I do see that vsmon.exe program running for a second or two before each program starts up. Doing some more research into this issue, it turns out that others have run into this problem and resolved it by always uninstalling ZoneAlarm and reinstalling each new version, rather than doing an upgrade. I may try this to see if I can things back to the fast startups I had been experiencing, although I'm loath to need to retrain ZoneAlarm on which programs should be allowed to access the Internet. More on this later.
Update: After a day or so of acceptable (but not great) performance, things ar back to the way they were. Maybe not quite so back, but starting the computer takes a long time as each process is examined by ZoneAlarm for 5-10 seconds before starting. I guess an uninstall/reinstall is in my future.
