Zone Alarm, over the years, has proved to be an absolute PITA for generating obscure and sometimes even intermittent issues. My feelings are to uninstall it completely.
As to the browser, for years I have used Slimbrowser which is really a "skin" for IE. Since the advent of
IE8 it became unusable. Reluctantly I made the switch to Firefox. However once configured it to my liking, I realised what I had been missing for all these years.
I suspect you might too if you make the change.
There are plenty of free alternatives to replace ZA. On this machine I have Free Outpost Personal firewall, M$ Security Essentials, Free Malware Bytes and free Spyware Blaster. They are all compatable with each other, seem to do the job, have a small footprint with very little intrusion once you have the firewall trained.