Cray's Tech Journal: Zone Alarm 6.5

This is the first post [to Cray's Tech Journal], so it will work to give you an idea of what I'll be getting at. It's pretty simple. I tell you what the user reported as the issue, what my more professional diagnosis yielded, and the solution(s) employed. I'm sure many of the problems I'll be covering have been covered elsewhere, but I'm just posting as I come to them. Some posts will not be in this style, I'm sure, but I'm aiming to make this the general style.

Report: User cannot change home page in Internet Explorer on one machine. Machines cannot "talk to each other."

Equipment: Two computers connected on south side of DI-524, both machines XP Pro SP2 with Zone Alarm. One machine has Zone Alarm 6.1.744.1, while other has 6.5.731.0.

Diagnosis: Both machines still successfully access internet. Zone Alarm settings for trusted Zone are correct. Program access rules seem correct. Upon changing home page in IE, after applying, leaving internet options and returning to internet options, home page has reset to previous setting. No known home page locking softwares on machine.

Troubleshooting: Lowered firewall on machine with ZA 6.1 with no improvement. Lowered firewall on machine with ZA 6.5 and achieved connectivity. Reraised ZA 6.1 on other machine and connectivity continued. Rechecked settings on ZA 6.5. Despite matching ZA 6.1 settings on other machine, ZA 6.5 has blocked communication between the machines in the trusted zone, although I'm not sure why this has occured all of the sudden after functioning correctly for so long.

Solution: I went ahead and uninstalled ZA 6.5, figuring on a corrupted install, and, just for the hell of it, attempted to change the homepage in IE. Amazingly, it now works correctly. Reinstallation of 6.5, however, once again locked the home page, although trusted zone connectivity remained intact. In the end, I uninstalled ZA 6.5 again, ran Regscrub, and installed ZA 6.1.744.1. All reported issues now seem to have been resolved. I set ZA 6.1 to manual updates to avoid it asking user to be updated to 6.5.

After working on this, I did some googling, and sure enough, ZA 6.5 seems to be troublesome. It bothers me a bit that it has been out for so long, and yet these problems remain. I actually noticed a little later that one of my personal machines has ZA 6.5.722.0, and sure enough, my IE home page is locked. I never change it, so I hadn't even noticed. Hopefully, Zone Labs will fix this issue in later releases, or at least add a control so you can disable the home page lock.
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Big Cray: Accept no Substitute