In all, ZoneAlarm is worth the money...Simple&Secure This program is simple to use and is as good as it get's for security. ( NO I DON'T WORK FOR ZONE LABS }
My initial experience with it was good, although a reviewer in CPU magazine had warned that it could conflict with Norton Anti-Virus. For a couple of days I had no problems. The interface is easy and intuitive and the configuration screens for selecting what you want blocked and filtered are easy to figure out and work your way thru. So far so good.
Then I installed a couple of small, new programs. These were Fail-Safe Technologies Guard IE program, a great little program which prevents websites from opening up all those annoying extra windows and advertisements in your browser--including something called embedded drop-down windows--and everything went downhill from there. The second program was Intel's Netboost Netsonic web-caching program, which speeds up the loading of web pages by caching previously used graphics and text, and only loading the elements that have changed. This is especially useful if you're on a slow dial-up collection, and the program works very well for that.
Unfortunately, everything went downhill from there, to the point where ZoneAlarm had everything locked down so thoroughly that I couldn't access the web at all. Furthermore, even after de-installing both these programs, I still could not access any website, or get email from my dial-up Earthlink account. I don't know which of the two programs was causing the problem with ZoneAlarm, or whether it was both, but anyway, obviously there was some sort of conflict.
Since then I've deinstalled and restalled ZoneAlarm, and although that did help quite a bit, occasionally I'll fire up my browser and I won't able to access any websites, even though, as far as I can see, nothing has changed in the configuration.
I'm still trying to troubleshoot these problems, so if I figure it out, I'll post another message here. In the meantime, I would have to say my initial enthusiasm for the product is somewhat dampened.
