Bloody Zone Alarm!!

Last night, when I turned on my computer, there was a little reminder that a new version of Zone Alarm is available and asked if I wanted to update it. So I did the usual thing, no problem, update it since ZA has been a great firewall for me.

But it turned out to be a disaster that took me 4 hours to revert and still didn't know why!

The update didn't work, and somehow I have no permission to either run it or kill it! And it blocked out my internet!!! Then it's a long series of search on internet after uninstalling it.

Then re-downloaded it, re-installed it, reboot, didn't work, clean-uninstalled it, reboot, re-re-installed it, reboot, still didn't work, tried again re-clean-uninstalled it, reboot, re-re-re-installed it, reboot, still bloody didn't work, re-re-clean-uninstalled it, found more detail information, follow some lengthy instructions, cleaned registry, deleted files, reboot into safe mode, deleted more files, reboot into normal mode, re-re-downloaded it, re-re-re-installed it, reboot, still freaking didn't work!!!

At my despair, I decided to not use it any more. So I re-re-re-clean-uninstalled it, reboot, and with the guts feeling of having messed around with the I decided to do a system restore back to before all these mess.

So I did a system restore back to Thursday, another reboot and to my astonishment, the little [Z|A] icon showed up on my system tray! So back to square one, with 4 hours of hope and frustration well rewarded...

What firewall do you use? Is there an alternative to the free and yet powerful ZoneAlarm? Hope it doesn't give me problem anymore....


Oh, a side story. When I was panicking about the firewall being turned off for update and eventually malfunction, I was simultaneously checking on other things on the net. And one of them was the online Chinese radio from Malaysia - WAONLINE, and somehow their frontpage got hacked (http://www.waonline.com.my) see hacked screenshot here. But I wasn't sure and thought could it be my firefox got hijacked!! And had a good paranoid!


I'm glad that the disaster is over. :```)