If only life were that simple....
In fact, I'd tried most of the suggestions with varying degrees of success. When I disconnected the phone line, I received an error message saying Unable to connect to Business Serve (that's my ISP) but whichever app was attempting to connect, it didn't identify itself. There's now been a result of sorts, in the form of an admission from Zone Labs. This occurred after I took RogueProtokol's tip and invoked MSCONFIG.
All in all, I spent about 6 hours in MSCONFIG, painstakingly enabling and disabling various options until I eventually tracked the problem down. It seems that there's a conflict between the new Zone Alarm and some of the settings in my 'Services' tab. Basically, I had to disable anything to do with networking, which was okay, because I don't have a networked system anyway - and, on top of that, I had to disable the 'Error Reporting' service and the system 'Event Log'. Having flagged this up to Zone Labs I've received an email from them saying that this is a known issue and will be fixed in the next version. I only wish they'd have come clean a bit sooner. It could have saved me hours of aggravation.
My instincts are to uninstall ZA and go back to the previous version - but I've read too many horror stories from people who tried to uninstall Zone Alarm. I'm going to continue with some of my services disabled and wait for the next version. It can't come soon enough!
Thanks to all for the various suggestions though.
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