frogbeastegg
06-17-2006, 12:49
Since the creation of this forum I'm not certain if such questions belong here or in the apothecary. It's not tech support as such. Just wondering if this sounds familiar to anyone else.
Yesterday Zonealarm did its usual thing and pestered me with one of those update boxes. I downloaded and installed the new version. Like the title says, the frog is suspicious. The update came via the usual sources, collected by the usual method. Never had any issues with that in the past. But this time ...
There was no "This is a security check from Zonelabs" message during the install. Ok, they might have dropped that.
Then up pops the usual set of questions about what kind of PC this is. Except they are different questions, asking how worried I am about spyware, how good with a PC I am, how often my PC has been hacked, and so on. No sign of the usual, more understandable questions. They’re also unskippable questions.
The little Zonealarm icon I see on the bottom right hand corner of my desktop keeps on changing. Took a few goes to catch it while it was in the altered state so I could get a tooltip. It claims to be running the update checker. Never seen it do this before; could be one of the new features ... but as frequently as every fifteen or so minutes? It takes priority away from firefox for a few seconds, so either I have to wait until it is done, or click on the window to get it back as the thing being used. Annoying. It also slows things down a tad.
Not even ten minutes ago I was playing HOMM5; the game minimalised without warning, as games do if the firewall jumps in with an alert of some kind. Except there was nothing. Never happened before. I quit the game, and when I returned to my desktop I found zonealarm had hung up in one of it's update checking sprees (which it wasn't in when the game was minimalised). Had to kill it with taskmanager after shutting down the net connection. Then, as if this wasn't enough, windows hung. Had to do a hard reboot.
The downloaded installation program was scanned with a virus checker, as per usual. Spyware checks have been run, as per usual. I've rummaged about in the assorted Zonealarm settings and info and can't find anything which looks wrong. Yet this feels like some kind of cracked spyware version of the firewall.
I'd download a new copy of the firewall, wipe off the old one and put the new copy in its place but I've no way of knowing that the new downloaded version would be different to this one. After all, this did come from the official channels.
Is Zonealarm Pro supposed to be doing this with the latest version (6.5.714.000)?
As a side issue, the firewall doesn’t seem to be blocking banner ads very well these days. They are set to blocked, with no exceptions on any site. Huh, I see them on most sites. Doesn’t block the irritating sounds on them either. Used to do, some months ago. Anyone else finding this?
Yesterday Zonealarm did its usual thing and pestered me with one of those update boxes. I downloaded and installed the new version. Like the title says, the frog is suspicious. The update came via the usual sources, collected by the usual method. Never had any issues with that in the past. But this time ...
There was no "This is a security check from Zonelabs" message during the install. Ok, they might have dropped that.
Then up pops the usual set of questions about what kind of PC this is. Except they are different questions, asking how worried I am about spyware, how good with a PC I am, how often my PC has been hacked, and so on. No sign of the usual, more understandable questions. They’re also unskippable questions.
The little Zonealarm icon I see on the bottom right hand corner of my desktop keeps on changing. Took a few goes to catch it while it was in the altered state so I could get a tooltip. It claims to be running the update checker. Never seen it do this before; could be one of the new features ... but as frequently as every fifteen or so minutes? It takes priority away from firefox for a few seconds, so either I have to wait until it is done, or click on the window to get it back as the thing being used. Annoying. It also slows things down a tad.
Not even ten minutes ago I was playing HOMM5; the game minimalised without warning, as games do if the firewall jumps in with an alert of some kind. Except there was nothing. Never happened before. I quit the game, and when I returned to my desktop I found zonealarm had hung up in one of it's update checking sprees (which it wasn't in when the game was minimalised). Had to kill it with taskmanager after shutting down the net connection. Then, as if this wasn't enough, windows hung. Had to do a hard reboot.
The downloaded installation program was scanned with a virus checker, as per usual. Spyware checks have been run, as per usual. I've rummaged about in the assorted Zonealarm settings and info and can't find anything which looks wrong. Yet this feels like some kind of cracked spyware version of the firewall.
I'd download a new copy of the firewall, wipe off the old one and put the new copy in its place but I've no way of knowing that the new downloaded version would be different to this one. After all, this did come from the official channels.
Is Zonealarm Pro supposed to be doing this with the latest version (6.5.714.000)?
As a side issue, the firewall doesn’t seem to be blocking banner ads very well these days. They are set to blocked, with no exceptions on any site. Huh, I see them on most sites. Doesn’t block the irritating sounds on them either. Used to do, some months ago. Anyone else finding this?