I was bored and in a downloading mood, so I figured I'd try installing a firewall. This particular one seemed to have somewhat decent ratings, so I spent a couple minutes and put it on my system. After all, if I don't like it, I can just uninstall it, right? Wrong! But I'll get to that later.

First things first... It installed just fine, with a few survey questions that weren't too invasive. A reboot or two later, it's installed and protecting my connection. Easy enough.

For every single solitary source of network traffic, ZoneAlarm asks if you want to allow that particular application to send/receive data in that particular manner. That itself is not much of a problem, as once sets the tone for forever. You can even click a "More Info" button to see what said transfer would entail. That is, supposedly you can. A click on this button consistently hung and crashed my Win98SE system.

For the time being, I said to myself, let's turn this off so I can get back to my web surfing. It politely closed itself upon request. Nice. Then I figured I should take it one step further... for the time being, I decided to go without a firewall, and removed it from the system startup.

Bad move.

The next time my system started up, my internet connection was 100% certifiably dead. Nothing came in, nothing went out. At first I suspected my ISP, then my hub. Then I tried firing up ZoneAlarm. Surprise, all systems go! With the firewall in place, my connection functioned as normal.

I was reasonably miffed. "No firewall is going to dictate my internet connection if I turn it off!" I said to myself. I proceeded to uninstall this aberration of a program.

After a quick reboot, I was STILL unable to connect. After some research on another computer, I discovered that ZoneAlarm puts its happy little tentacles all in and out of the system directory and the registry. It had to be entirely removed, piece by piece.

30 minutes, a printout from ZoneAlarm support (apparently this problem is COMMON), and some fun with the registry finally found the demise of this program on my system.

Good riddance!

My only regret is that I failed to more thoroughly read reviews about product compatibility before installing.

Recommended: No