Thread: Zone Alarm is freaking out...

  1. #1
    Unregistered User Yarin's Avatar
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    Zone Alarm is freaking out...

    This isn't on my computer, but my parent's computer (yet again), that's having problems. Basicly, ever since yesterday vsmon.exe (Zone Alarm's workhorse process) has been freaking out by sucking up all the CPU's time. The strange thing is, this only happens when you dial-out. Until you do so, everything's fine; no hint of trouble. But about 10 seconds after the connection gets established, it jumps out of control. While it's out of control it won't respond to the commanded shutdown (through zlclient.exe), and any program that then tries to access the net get's frozen (I'm assuming the programs get blocked automaticly, then stay frozen until ZA can process the request, but in this case, it's too busy doing nothing and killing the CPU). Disconnecting doesn't do anything either, long after the system is disconnected it's still going strong. And the computer has a hard time shutting down while it's doing this (duh). Have any of you ever seen this problem before? Know how to fix it?

  2. #2
    and the hat of copycat stevesmithx's Avatar
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    Well I guess popular free firewalls have these CPU usage problem.
    I had problems with ZA sometime ago and switched to Comodo which runs fine except at times 50% of CPU is consumed by cmdagent.exe esp. after using firefox. But the problem is fixed once ccleaner is run.
    But after using both ZA and Comodo, I would say the latter is far better than former IMO.
    Edit:
    It could also be a problem of router misconfiguration or the underlying OS not supporting the driver for router but I am not sure. I remember having this problem when i first configured the internet configuration at home myself. With a frenzy to get things done quickly, I didn't read the manual and misconfigured the router. Then I reinstalled the router's driver software and configured it correctly and then all was fine. At that time I didn't have ZA or comodo, when i started the browser or any application connecting to the internet my system froze, which is somewhat similar to your problem I think.
    Last edited by stevesmithx; 01-12-2009 at 10:10 PM.
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