Zone Alarm has crippled my system!!

[JohnE]

I have a PC which can dual boot into either Windows 2000 or Windows XP (each OS is on its own separate partition). Zone Alarm Pro is installed on both partitions.

When I boot into Windows 2000, both Internet Explorer and Outlook Express are virtually crippled. Outlook Express can neither send emails nor receive them - but here's the really weird thing.... Internet Explorer (IE6) can only access sites that end in ".co.uk" It can't seem to access sites ending in ".com"!!!

Actually, that's not quite true - some .com sites are accessible - but very, very few. If I shut down ZA Pro, both programs start working again.

My first thought was to try the Zone Alarm user forum - but it won't let me register!! No matter what name I pick, it just keeps telling me that the name is invalid...!

I back up my partitions regularly so I tried restoring backups from as long ago as the start of the year. However, that doesn't solve the problem. It must have been like this for at least 6 weeks without me noticing (I mostly tend to use XP, on the other partition).

Can anyone think of something to explain this weird behaviour???

[Jason425]

virus?

[JohnE]

I did a virus scan with Norton AntiVirus - and I also ran Ad-Aware. Both of them came up clean (apart from the usual cookies detected).

I finally got through to Zone Labs - who said that it sounds like a problem with the TrueVector service (whatever that is). They've given me some things to investigate, so Im going to try them later.

Wish me luck...

[JohnE]

Jason - looks like you were right about the virus. I eventually uninstalled ZA Pro and re-installed it. Straight away it detected an application called Spooler.exe trying to access the internet. According to Google and other sites, this is a well known Trojan Horse.

Here's the interesting thing though. There's no actual application called Spooler.exe anywhere on my system. ZA Pro now reports it and I can see it in Task Manager - but there's no such file on my system. It must be hiding inside some other application.

Since Norton AntiVirus didn't detect it, I'm inclined to try something else. I came across an interesting little product called RegRun, from Greatis Software. Have you ever heard of it?

[Jason425]

No I haven't. AVG is free. http://free.grisoft.com

[StinkyMojo]

its actually www.free.grisoft.com

[Jason425]

Originally Posted by StinkyMojo

its actually www.free.grisoft.com

that's what I meant.

[JohnE]

Thanks, I'll give AVG a try when RegRun expires. The evaluation version of RegRun successfully removed Spooler.exe, so I'm happy again.

RegRun does seem to be doing a good job, so far - but lit's hellishly complicated!!