ZoneAlarms problem on Windows Vista

I have been using Windows Vista on my home PC for a few weeks now - I will write about my experiences and opinions of Vista soon. But I was about to upgrade it back to Windows XP because of the appalling performance and reliability I was suffering. It would randomly hang or start going slow despite being a new machine with 3Gb ram and Quad core processors. I would also get cryptic errors like this one.

I did loads of monitoring and analysis but Vista was giving no clues as to the source of the problem. However, through a series of troubleshooting steps that involved uninstalling just about everything and re adding it and then testing I discovered the the culprit was ZoneAlarms Security Suite. It was causing the machine to run like a dog. So if you are running ZoneAlarms on Vista Home Premium (32-bit) and are suffering similar problems then this may well be the solution to your problems.

The current (as of 22nd Jan 2008) gold version of ZA for Vista is 7.1.078.000. This has seemingly been the root of most of these performance problems. If you go here http ://download.zonelabs.com/bin/free/beta/zavistabeta.html you will find a Beta release of version 7.1.247.000. This release so far seems to have fixed the problems and the performance has returned to normal - certainly sufficiently for me to persevere with Vista for a while longer.

I should say that even though this has fixed my problems it is Beta software so you should read all the terms and conditions and warnings carefully before you decide to install it. Beta software is rarely if ever supported.