The free ZoneAlarm firewall does not include the Program Advisor feature and was thus not affected, he said. The issue affected only the commercial ZoneAlarm Pro and ZoneAlarm Security Suite, he added. Customers who rebooted their PCs automatically received that new version, Freund said. The company late Thursday posted a corrected Program Advisor update. The problem was replicated in the software maker's security lab and resolved within five hours, according to a posting on Zone Labs' Web site. Zone Labs discovered the issue after customers began reporting crashes. The faulty update was made available around 4 p.m. About 3 million people use ZoneAlarm Pro and ZoneAlarm Security Suite worldwide, according to ZoneLabs's figures. About 50,000 users experienced crashes, he added. Most customers who experienced the crashes were in Asia, because it was morning there when the update was first made available and users were starting up their PCs, Freund said. When your machine has rebooted, run the CLEAN.exe file which is the updated Clean tool of ZA to remove residual file of the old version. Locate for ZoneAlarm Security and UNINSTALL it then reboot PC when prompted.
By default, ZoneAlarm products check on start-up for a new version and download and install it, Freund said. Right-click on the WINDOWS icon (bottom-left) on your screen. A new version of the list is produced daily.
The Program Advisor update is a list of trusted programs that tells the firewall which applications should be allowed to connect to the Internet without user interaction.
"There was somewhat of a process breakdown," Freund said on Friday. Thursday's update contained a bug that had slipped by Zone Labs' quality checks. The crashes happened after people downloaded the daily Program Advisor update, said Gregor Freund, general manager of Zone Labs, which is part of Check Point Software. The downloads seem to be going fine, but when I go to run the install program, Im consistently getting a corrupted file error message from the install wizard. A bug in a Zone Labs update caused firewall crashes late Thursday for about 50,000 users of the popular ZoneAlarm Pro and ZoneAlarm Security Suite products.