No question here just sharing experience in case it can help someone else. I've been using ZA Pro firewall for several years through a number of updated versions without encountering any problems until the latest update version 6.06. This version blocks normal activity such as games that have video intros or trailers. It even required permission to open a word document and would pop up warning of dangerous activity for the most mundane of things. At one stage it blocked itself. I perservered with it for a while but the final straw came when I could no longer retrieve pop mail using outlook express or outlook 2001. I could send mail but not receive any. I tried switching off ZA, The Windows firewall was already off, I turned off Msoft Antispyware and still no joy. It was apparent something common to both Outlook Express and Outlook2001 was broken. Uninstalled ZA. No Joy. Good old System Restore saved me. Just reverted to a date before the ZA update and OE is fixed. Then reinstalled ZA version 5.5 and everything is back to "normal". A quick scan of support forum at ZA website revealed a host of problems associated with Ver 6. It's a lemon. End of rant. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

Thanks for that info, Richard. I'm also using an older version of ZA for the same reasons you just mentioned. Seems as though that newer version is rather buggy. I think they take a great product and then self destruct it by adding way too many unnecesary things; and then things become buggy and unstable. I'm gonna stick with my older version too... Take care; enjoy your weekend everyone. ~Tommyo

Hello, A friend of mine and I downloaded ZA 6 two weekends ago today, and we had exactly the same problems described by Richard59 and then some. In my friend's computer, neither MSN nor Yahoo IM would work at all, not even after giving them full permissions in Zone Alarm's settings, and in my case, they did work but took ages to connect to the net. ZA 6 also slowed down our computers considerably. After three or four days, we decided to go back to version 5.5 too, but a few things had evidently been modified or changed by version 6 and going back to version 5.5 didn't fix them all automaticlly (perhaps it blocked some files??). Therefore, we did an overtop reinstall of Win XP each, then applied the post-Service Pack 2 updates, and all is working fine again. It's better to stay clear from ZA 6 for the time being. Juan