I hate running Windows.

I hate that the firewall app that I have run for years has suddenly decided to go and melt down into a giant puddle of goo, taking the CPU with it.

About two weeks ago, ZoneLabs released a broken update for their ZoneAlarm product.

Whoops! I did it again!

Yesterday, my Dell laptop slowed to a crawl, and began acting erratically. I thought it was me, and tried to re-boot. The re-boot hung, and I had to pull the battery out to go to shut down. Re-boot, and poof, it happens again.

Oh well, too hot to work anyway. Go to bed.

Get into the office this morning and the same thing begins to happen. Task Manager shows me that vsmon.exe is sucking 90%+ of my CPU. What the hell?

Turns out that this is the Vector Service that ZoneAlarm uses. Ahhh, corrupted ZoneAlarm. Uninstall, re-install, and poof! It happens again.

So I am sitting here, feeling VERY exposed right now. I am not enabling the Microsoft firewall, because it doesn’t play nice with IPSec apps, like my VPN app.
ZoneAlarm was rock solid. What happened?

And would anyone like to donate an iBook or Powerbook to your dear author?