Re: FIX for ZoneAlarm & KB951748 issue released
> At this point some versions of Zone Alarm barfed. I don't use Zone Alarm
> so the rest of the story I gleaned from reading Zone Alarm forums and
> official announcements. The Zone Alarm application noticed that some
> Windows files had changed and decided not to allow these files to
> communicate to the Internet. It wasn't anything in the way the files
> worked, merely that they had changed, that caused the problem. Because
> these are system files Zone Alarm doesn't ask about them. Clearing the
> Zone Alarm database so that it would not think the files were changed
> fixed the problem. How is an OS supposed to update itself if it can't
> change files? The way that Zone Alarm monitors and responds to system file
> changes is flawed.
It looks like this may not be quite the whole story. There are conflicting
reports about exactly what caused Zone Alarm to barf. Some stories say it
was Zone Alarm's heuristics causing the problem. Others say the update broke
the way Zone Alarm uses unsupported methods to hack the kernel. Zone Alarm
hasn't commented officially that I can find. It doesn't really change
anything. It's merely a technical point of interest. The fault lays with
Zone Alarm if either reason is the cause.
--
Kerry Brown
MS-MVP - Windows Desktop Experience: Systems Administration
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/
http://vistahelpca.blogspot.com/