Zonealarm (free) kills Windows Vista Home Basic

[Staff]

Hello there.

I have just found a very weird problem with my Vista laptop. Yesterday I installed the system using the OEM (Acer) disks and everything went fine until I tried to install ZoneAlarm (the free one). It happened this morning, while installing Vista only showed a BSOD and rebooted, throwing me to the Fail safe mode. Since there were several software installations taking place at the same time as ZoneAlarm, I thought Vista was simply unable to handle them all and failed. The problem is that even when I completed all installations in Fail safe mode, the system was still unusable (after login, the BSOD appeared again and rebooted).

To solve the problem I used the OEM disks, but again, when installing ZoneAlarm (and only ZoneAlarm), Vista showed the BSOD and refused to work in normal mode again. This time I tried something different (since I already knew the cause of the problem): from Fail safe mode I uninstalled ZoneAlarm, and the system worked again.

All of this gave me the conclusion that there is currently a problem between Vista and ZoneAlarm (a month ago there was none). Is anyone else having this problem? Is there already a work around? I would really hate to surf the web without ZoneAlarm (don't trust Vista's firewall).

Thanks.

Staff.

[nellie2]

Did you install the right version? It needs to be Zone Alarm for Vista

[pa1916]

Did you turn off Windows Firewall and Windows Defender??.

I have tried a number of Firewalls and antivirus software with Vista the best so far is Norton 360 the other two are Bullgard but this causes your computer to hang on booting because it starts updating before Vista is fully loaded the next is Panda

that seems to work well with vista but Norton 360 is the better.