ZoneAlarm Revisited
After continued slowness, I finally bit the bullet and did a complete uninstall of ZoneAlarm. The Zone Labs site has a good writeup of how to do completely remove the product - although it turned out the uninstall program did a good job of getting rid of all traces of the program. It turns out that over time, the database ZoneAlarm uses can get corrupted, which causes the problem. No amount of patching the executable will solve the problem.
I got a small scare once I had everything cleaned up, and was ready to reinstall. On my account page, I was unable to download the latest version of ZoneAlarm because I hadn't bought "download protection". However, I just installed the latest evaluation version, and everything was fine - the license key was still stored in the Windows registry, so I didn't have to do any additional work. I'm not sure why Zone Labs would go to the trouble of maintaining each user's "download status" - unless of course they hope to make money on "download protection."
