zone alarm issue
 

it's hard to explain, but zone alarm seems to have been the cause of the problem with my laptop today. It just would not load the taskbar or any of the desktop icons, it was making noises like it was running a test, so i assumed it was... however i couldn't get to access anything on the laptop until my other half came home and fiddled with it. some dialogue box kept appearing saying 'zone alarm is initializing please wait' but it never loaded zone alarm at all, and zone alarm couldn't be accessed from the menu. we ran the avg test and there was no virus found through that -

any ideas?

Re: zone alarm issue
 

You could try uninstalling and reinstalling it. Or even try a completely different free firewall as ZA can be very problematic. :)

Re: zone alarm issue
 

are there any particularly recommended free firewalls? we did uninstall zone alarm, do you think we should reinstall it? we've never had any problems with it until now..

Re: zone alarm issue
 

I recommed that you don't bother re-installing ZA as it can affect your connection speed but install Comodo Firewall instead :)

Re: zone alarm issue
 

Kerio works well for me.