Hi

If any one out there can help me please do. When I boot up my system ever thing is running smooth as silk. But if I leave my system running for a few hours it starts to bog down. Applications that used to open in seconds take minutes! I checked the task manager and it looks like vsmon.exe is eating up 85 to 100% of my cpu time! Is this common with Zone Alarm? Can I fix it or must i uninstall it and go with some other fire wall? I have a 1GHZ AMD Athlon Thunderbird processor, 384mb of DDR SDRAM, a 30GB master and 40GB slave drive. Im running Windows 2000 pro. I also run WinMX for file sharing.

Please help!!!

Okay I've done some playing. I shut down Zone Alarm and went into task manager. It just alocated the cpu time to another application! It seems that windows 2000 it's self is alocating most of the cpu's time to just one application. Any clues as to whats happening? Any help would be very welcome. Thanks.

I am having the same problem with vsmon.
After startup it behaves well, after some time it takes up a lot of processor time.
Just updated to the latest version, but didn't help

Same here didn't have a problem until 2 days ago. Can't pinpoint any events that may have triggered it. But once the Machine sits idle for awhile (time indeterminate) it practically stops. Uninstalling zone alarm fixes it.

Reinstall zone alarm and everything worked great until I let the machine sit for a while and bingo lock up. :)

Same here too. This problem started since yesterday (Tue, 27th) afternoon. Initially we thought that it might be because of trojan/virus so we cleaned the network with latest Anti-virus, still problem appeared again.

Finally, it seems the problem is triggred after we allow services.exe to access the internet. But not sure yet.

This problem started today (Aug 27)in the afternoon after starting outlook express. Outlook would load and then the system would hang. At the same time i would get a nimda flood off of the network. I solved the nimda flood by turning off all of the folder sharing. I then re-tried outlook and it still hung. I was able to bring up the task manager and saw that vsmon was using 99 percent of the cpu time. I tried various avenues to stop the system from hanging after starting outlook (disabling norton, removing wifi device [not in use at time]) the only thing that worked originally was working offline this allowed outlook to load and funtion properly, i thin went to online mode to check the email and it once again hung and task man. showed the same symptoms.. This lead me to the conclution that there is some interaction between outlook and zone alarm causing the problem. On the next reboot i shutdown zone alarm and then started outlook, this allowed me to check my mail without incident. I think that the problem must be a worm of some sort because this problem was not present in the morning, but only in the later half of the day... Hopefully someone can use this info to make a diagnosis to the real problem, since my fix forces you to deactivate ZA or not use outlook.

How odd. Last night, at around 10:30PM EDT, I tried turning on my machine to check email. I too ran into this problem. Start Outlook up, and vsmon.exe hogs 99% of my CPU, and the machine becomes so slow and unresponsive that resetting is my only option. The machine was responding fine all day, until about 5:00PM EDT when I shut it down. Only crops up when I try to start Outlook 2000 to check my email. Using an Athlon 1.33GHz, Win2K Pro.

Same problem here. vsmon uses 99% of
my CPU after trying to get my mail.

I'm thinking I'll uninstall Zone Alarm, then
get the email, then reinstall it, and see if
that helps.

Windows 2000
P4/1.6 GHz
Zone Alarm Free
DSL
Outlook Express

Whilst investigating the same thing as above, I found this too, don't know if its related but I havent noticed it before.

I had task manager open but minimised, so hence had the cpu task bar icon in the corner.
Whilst reading this thread, I noticed erratic cpu utilisation. poking around, I found it was Internet Explorer taking up the cpu up to 100% if I whizz up and down on the microsoft mouse wheel!!!!

Go ahead try it!

whilst reading this, open and minimise task manager and make this post scroll up and down the Internet Explorer window!!!

Now something as simple as that causing huge utilisation can't be good can it?????

I have had similar problems with vsmon causing errors at shutdown and slow CPU response. I just went into ZA and turned off Mail Safe. Everything now seems to be back to normal.

Can others confirm this result?

same problem here with vsmon, started the same time as everyone else. However, I dont use outlook at all so that cant be the cause for me.

vsmon is also currently up to 47megs memory utilization. it has to be more than a coincidence that this started for everyone on the same day??

Same here,
Just upgraded my version of Zone Alarm, and 100%cpu util.

Oh well Zone Labs, might be a good idea to test your apps first before relasing them!

James

This is quite something! I got tired of having VSMON not responding when shutting down so I did a little research and here I am discovering it may be the cause of other problems! I am going to try turning off mail safe as one person suggested, if I discover anything else I'll put up a notice.

Nancy

Same problem here too. Since yesterday I can't work on my laptop anymore after vsmon took over the cpu power (100%!!).
Didn't install an update of Zonealarm. At the time happening it wasn't even running.Weird!!!

System:
Windows 2000 SP3
P3/866MHz
Zone Alarm Full Version
LAN internet connection

HELP!!!

Your problems could very well be caused by the Backdoor.delf virus. I'm having the same issues with my Win2K pc, and I'm still trying to fix it, but this looks like a possible culprit.

Chris

see http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/backdoor.delf.html

So i posted before about this problem and now it has suddenly dissapeared as quickly as it started.... odd... i changed no setting and upgraded no software and it now works as before (no cpu hogging), without any explination

hi all,

same here since today...that's how and why I find this forum. it also crashed my taskbar.

zone alarm pro
win2000 sp3
p3 450

by the way, i didn't upgrade zone alarm since one month (I check for upgrade manuely)
and yes it's strange that happens to all the same day....