Firefox Vs. Zonealarm - Firewall Does Not Recognize Ff After Update

Upgraded FF from 43.xx to 47.xx, because it was bugging me. My firewall, good old ZoneAlarm, which has happily gone through every FF upgrade for years, has suddenly decided to not recognize the new version.

Didn't get a 'this program has changed' prompt after the upgrade and a reboot, and at this point, if ZA is on, Firefox flat does not work; it won't pull a connection and the firewall doesn't recognize that it's trying. I've manually removed the Firefox entries from ZA's program list, and it still isn't picking them up. Manually added firefox.exe and the plugin container to the list with all green allows, nothing.

And yet, the instant I disable ZA, everything works. Google and the FF KB have been spectacularly useless, and the only thing that even sounds remotely plausible is from the ZoneAlarm support forums like five years ago; removing the ZA database in safe mode and forcing it to rebuild a clean allow/deny list.

Anyone have -any- other thoughts before I go through with this?

 

ZA can be plenty problematic, up to and including causing BSODs, rip it out of there, enable Windows firewall during testing, run ZA's uninstall/cleanup tool (if they have one) to completely flush it.

Download a fresh ZA after running through all your usual software to check for any anomalies, alt. you could try Comodo or Private Firewall.

 

Notice this tool: http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/zone_alarm_uninstall.html

 

I don't know if it will help but, FF is at v. 49.0.2. I'm running Windows Firewall and Windows Defender only and not having any problems.

 

Ditching ZA seems to be the consensus, from where I've posted. To be honest, I've been using it for so long that I forgot Windows Firewall even existed on XP. Might try the database refresh first, but nuking it's an option.

 

The Windows XP Firewall is mediocre at best.
Rather use Privatefirewall as suggest by satrow.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/privatefirewall.html

 

Agreed but the XP firewall should be fine for testing purposes (you don't want to introduce another 3rd party software yet) while checking how any affected applications (FF47/49 in this instance) behave post-ZA. If they work as expected, download a fresh installer of ZA to try it again, or checkout Private Firewall or Comodo instead.