Why does Zone Alarm randomly shut down on me?

Hello,

I am pod and I'm hoping someone can help with this problem I'm having:-

Zone Alarm installed OK and worked OK at first but occasionally it shuts itself down. I sometimes get the old 'Send/don't send error report' dialog box with the message 'TrueVector Service has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience'. After this the little Z in my system tray bexomes a red X and if I check the Zone Alarm control center it says 'System error - please reboot' instead of 'All systems active'.

I'm concerned that this will leave me unprotected as zonealarm disables the windows firewall on install but I've heard and read here that the windows firewall is a bit cac and I'd be keen to get ZA working reliably.

ZA sometimes starts up again almost immediately without any reboot but sometimes it stays down for longer / indefinately.

I'm suspicious that some nasty has got into my PC and is shutting ZA to do its dirty work but I have AVG which never finds owt and i ran ccleaner / adaware / spybot and the problem persists.

So has anyone else had this prob or can anyone advise? I hope I'm not asking a common question - I did try to search.

Im on and oldish slowish XP pc by the way.

Thanks,

pod.

 

one simple way you can do is to uninstall zone alarm and reinstall it but clean computer first before reinstalling it.or try a system restore to revert its working state.

 

Do you have the anti-virus component of ZA running? Also what anti-virus software are you running, if any?

Have you tried uninstalling ZA, running a cleaner like Ccleaner Slim and reinstalling ZA?

 

thanks guys,

I did uninstall ZA and was going to do without it until I found this forum which has reaffirmed my lack of faith inthe windows firewall. I've now reinstalled ZA but I can't honestly remember what cleaning i'd done while it was uninstalled so I could double check that i guess.

I've got ccleaner - is that the same as ccleaner slim?

To be honest i'm not really sure of the 'system restore' procedure (this is my low level of expertise coming out now). I havent set any restore points or what ever you do. I hope you don't mean a full format and rebuild coz I'd prefer to avoid that (despite its advantages). You see I got the PC 2nd hand (free) and it has its original genuine windows on it but i have no discs so if i reformatted i'd have all the faff and that WGA thing to deal with if i did it of a copied windows disk, right?

I'm on the basic free ZA firewall only, and i have AVG free av.

I'll try to set about checking my cleans again and another reinstall of ZA but any more ideas in the meantime will be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

Yes Ccleaner is the same as Ccleaner Slim, only without the bloat.

So it sounds like you are not uninstalling ZA completely, so True Vector continues to run. So lets do a clean uninstall and reinstall.

First, set a new system restore point as you will be editing the registry later.

First open Task Manager (CTRL+ALT+DELETE) and end all vsmon.exe processes (there could be more than one so look carefully).

Right click the ZA icon in the system tray and click Restore ZoneAlarm Control Center. Go to
Overview > Preferences and uncheck Load ZoneAlarm at startup. Close Control Center, right click the icon again and then click Shutdown ZoneAlarm.

Note: If you're unable to carry out this step because the icon is missing, you can skip it and proceed with the next steps, but in this case do them all in safe mode!

REBOOT

Go to Start > Programs > ZoneLabs and click Uninstall, or uninstall ZA using Control Panel > Software > Add/Remove Programs.

If a security check appears, click Yes and continue the uninstall procedure.

REBOOT

Make sure hidden files and folders are shown. To do this open Windows Explorer. Click Tools and then Folder Options > View.

Choose Show hidden files and folders, uncheck Hide protected operating system files (Windows 2000/XP/2003 only) and click OK.

Next go to Start > Search > Files and Folders. Make sure the location box is set to search your Local Hard Drive(s) . Also make sure the Advanced Search Options are set to search subfolders and hidden files. Now copy the entire line below, paste it into the search box and click Search Now.


Zonelabs; "zone labs"; "Internet logs"; vsconfig.xml; vsdata.dll; vsdata95.vxd; vsdatant.sys; vsmon.*; vsmonapi.dll; vsnetutils.dll;vspubapi.dll; zaplus.*; zapro.*; zllictbl.dat; zlparser.dll; zonealarm.exe; zoneband.dll; vsutil.dll; zlclient.*


A list of files and folders belonging to ZoneAlarm will appear in the Search Results pane.
Now proceed by deleting all ZoneLabs files and folders that were found.

Empty the Recycle Bin.

Now remove all ZoneLabs keys that may be left in the Windows registry. To do this copy the lines below and paste them into Notepad.

Save the file as zabegone.reg, double click it and allow for the registry changes to be made.


REGEDIT4

[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ZAMailSafe]

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Zone Labs]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Zone Labs]

[-HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Zone Labs]


*REBOOT

ZoneAlarm will now be completely removed from your computer. If you wish to install a new copy of ZA, be sure to do so under an administrator account with full rights and permissions.

 

Thank you for your detailed instructions, Lev. I finally got around to following them this weekend (a bit slack of me I know).

I found that I couldn't end the vsmon.exe process in task manager without shutting down ZA from the system tray first so I unchecked the 'load at startup' and just shut it down then followed your instructions with the net unplugged (not exactly how you described it so hopefully I didn't lay myself open to all sorts of horrors there).

The search brought up nearly a gig of files! Mostly 'error logs' as I recall, and some folders (c:\windows\internet logs I think) which I just emptied.

My PC still worked and I've now reinstalled ZA (a slightly newer version as it happens). I updated and ran CCleaner, Spybot, Adaware and my AVG antivirus to hopefully check that I hadn't contracted anything bad whilst on the MS firewall or worse during ZA crashes. All came up pretty clean.

ZA hasn't crashed on me yet so I'd cautiously say that It's worked.

Thank you very much for your help.