Unless you will never, ever uninstall it.  Ever!  It is a beast to uninstall.  The code writers at ZoneAlarm did a crappy, crappy job of writing the uninstall utility.  It only uninstalls enough of ZoneAlarm to completely disable your network connection.  It leaves a whole load of crap in your registry and half a dozen directories strewn about your hard drive.  I spent all of last night uninstalling it.  Why couldn't they write their own uninstall utility so that it did this???  Crappy, crappy, stupid, moronic, annoying programmers!  I hate ZoneAlarm with a passion!  There must have been a hundred registry keys to find and delete.  Did I mention I hate ZoneAlarm?  And I'm not the only one who has had this problem:

[url]http://www.cnet.com/software/0-352108-1218-6686415.html?pn=1&lb=2&ob=0&tag=st.sw.352108.bottom.6686415-1
[/url]
That's one small sample.  There are many more frustrating stories like mine across the web.

Fortunately, ZoneAlarm documented their horrible uninstall mess on their website, or I never would have made it.
[url]http://www.zonealarm.com/services/support_install_Me.htm[/url]

--------------
Edited to fix URL.

You are not the only one!

Had exact same problem.  Called tech support for my ISP.  One of his first questions?  "Are you using Zone Alarm as a firewall?"

Stay away!  I use the Norton now.

 [img]http://www.stopstart.fsnet.co.uk/smilie/sadness.gif[/img]

I had it installed on two computer, uninstalled fine from both (win 98) I did have the same problem you had for awhile, but I figured out why, when I uninstalled it from control panel, it blocked all dialup and network connections, but when I used the provided uninstall utility(in the Zonealarm directory) it uninstalled fine, and no problems. I have found that I have no use for a firewall because I'm on a university system that has some firewalls, I have nothing of value on my computer, and our connection speed is so horrible that nobody could sucessfully use my connection for anything....I know from experiance.

I've uninstalled it many times w/out loosing my network connection.

YMMV

Why are you un-installing it?  Some people seem to like it.

CNET Rating: 9 out of 10  
User Opinions: 87%(thumbs up) - 13% (thumbs down)out of 1214 votes

Yeah, silly me for wanting to be able to uninstall it.  That seems to be ZoneAlarm's attitude, too.  You will install it and you will like it.  You will not uninstall it.  Resistance is futile.

I know it seems to work fine and/or uninstall fine for some people.  That's great.  I just wanted to warn people that they may encounter problems.  As far as I can tell, ZoneAlarm doesn't know why their uninstaller sometimes doesn't work.  And the problem isn't just that their uninstaller doesn't work, it has disastrous consequences when it doesn't.  If someone came out with a new model of AR-15 that 87% of people loved, but 13% of people had it blow up in their faces and some of them lost eyes or teeth, would you still call that a good product?

Software should uninstall without nuking your machine.  The fact that it doesn't do it to 100% of people is no excuse and would be no comfort to me if I was evaluating whether I wanted to use it or not.

That sucks.

BTW, have any of you guys had problems accessing shares or providing shares while ZA is running? On my Win98SE system, when ZA is running I cannot access shares on the Win2000 server and other clients (98, ME, 2000) cannot access shares on my machine. The end result is I have to close ZA anytime I want to access other systems.

How do you get around that?

I guess I could add a little detail which might explain why some people can "uninstall" ZoneAlarm and not have any problems.  I "uninstalled" ZoneAlarm a couple months ago because it was causing me problems with sharing files and printers with another computer on my home network.  I had a hardware firewall anyway, so the software firewall was not needed and was getting in the way.  So I used the Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel to remove ZoneAlarm.  That fixed my file and print sharing problem, so I left it at that for a while.  However, I couldn't get Quicken to connect to the Internet.  I dug around for a while and found out ZoneAlarm hadn't gone anywhere at all.  It was still running TrueVector and MiniLog in the background.  All its directories were still on the computer.  I turned off TrueVector and MiniLog using selective startup, and found out I had no Internet connection when I did that.  That's when I had to go through the whole painful manual uninstall to completely remove ZoneAlarm from my system.  Now I have full network access again, including from Quicken.  ZoneAlarm is evil.  Uninstall should mean uninstall, not hide.

hey that sounds like microsofts marketing strategy..  zonealarm is good for a free firewall. ive never had a problem uninstalling it. but since i got Norton SystemWorks pro i got the norton firewall and been using it since. much nicer that zonealarm. with the same app based rules. plus extra rules that let you block or permit by IP ranges.

permit all action by explorer.exe, and server actions as well. that should permit the shares to work.

NOVA5, thanks, but it didn't make any difference.

Damn ZA!

Black Ice works well....

Aviator  [img]www.milpubs.com/aviator.gif[/img]

That problem didn't show up until 2.62a.  Up till then it ran flawlessly. So whatever they did they screwed up at least the free version.

Benjamin

Aviator, go see what Steve Gibson at grc.com has to say about BlackICE.

ZA works great for me, just got the Pro version.  Granted I've never tried uninstalling it, but the Windows Registry is (how can I say this gently?) an impenetrable abomination of the computing world.  If ZA posts instructions of how to completely uninstall their product, then they've done all right by me.  Most programs are hard to uninstall and that is done by design.  Get a registry cleanup tool if you need assistance.

The only other firewall I recommend (and believe me, I know what I'm talking about on this issue) is called Tiny Personal Firewall.  Tiny isn't as good as ZA, but it works all right.  ZA can be hard to configure, but you just have to read the directions.  

I had to get rid of Zone Alarm because of my ISP. Zone Alarm, at least the free version, is just a little too primative to keep up with the rotating IP address' and constantly blocks your internet connection throughout the day.

They recommended Black Ice, which I had to purchase, but has worked great for me with no internet interuptions. Just make sure to update it regularly. There was an important Black Ice update recently concerning a Ping Flood gap in the protection.

Trickshot, I have to respectfully disagree.  Many programs are hard to uninstall or don't completely take their footprints out of the registry.  I find that annoying, too, but fine, I can live with that.  In general it doesn't cause much, if any, harm.  

ZoneAlarm is different in two important ways.  First, it keeps portions of itself hidden [b]and running[/b] even after it "uninstalls".  It's not just passively taking up space on your hard drive or in your registry.  It is [b]still partially active[/b] after you remove it the normal way.  I haven't found any documentation on the ZoneAlarm website that says that it will do this, but it does.  

Second, if you attempt to remove the remaining portions of ZoneAlarm and don't do it exactly the right way, you will lose your Internet connection.  I had a second computer and was able to use it to surf the web for help.  Those with a single computer would have found themselves SOL, as in fact many people have, judging from the myriad stories I have read.  That is a [b]bad[/b] thing to do to someone.  Some people have even gone so far as to reinstall their OS because they couldn't figure out what had gone wrong.  Due to the severity of the potential problem, ZoneAlarm should warn you up front in big print that uninstall may require special procedures and may have serious consequences if those special procedures are not followed exactly.  I had no idea those special procedures existed.  And why should I?  I found an offending piece of ZoneAlarm remaining in my startup and removed it.  That seemed perfectly logical since I had already uninstalled ZoneAlarm.  How was I to know that it would kill my network connection?  If ZoneAlarm is going to do something so weird and so serious, they should warn people up front instead of tucking the answer away on a web page that people with the problem may not be able to get to when they need it.

I just snorted Chili with lots of Tabasco out my nose.  3 years ago I paid for and downloaded Black Ice.  It locked up my machine, they wouldn't even answer my emails requesting support.

Try Clean Sweep. The version I use is the Quarterdeck version--it's now a Norton app, and I can't speak to the Norton version.

It monitors every program you install--including registry keys, and completeley clears the computer of an app when you choose to uninstall.

I think the version I have is 4.o Extra Strength, which you might be able to find out there on the 'net. Have a sneaking suspicion that Norton probably turned it into a POS, but that seems to be what Norton does. If you can find the Quarterdeck version, try it, it may be just what you need not only for this ZA headache, but for others as well.

If you're using nothing but NAT you're probably not 100% protected.

Never had a problem with ZA, and its top rated in its field- kicks the $&!% out of Black Ice in tests too- best of all its free! How can you beat that?

Security is a complex issue- I strongly recommend anyone with a broadband connection install a firewall.

I'm not going to touch the install/uninstall issues since I have seen way to many dubious "problems" created by users.

If you believe every problem you hear is the end of the world, we would all be using an abacus, two cans and a string...

I wondered how long it would be before someone blamed the problem on me.  Congratulations, Grock, you're the winner!  It's true that my frustation was showing through in my first post.  After all, ZoneAlarm had just caused me a evening of hell after a couple months of nagging problems.  But even without the emotion, ZoneAlarm has a serious flaw.

I do integrated circuit failure analysis for a living and am also my lab's PC and Unix system administrator.  I know plenty about debugging very complex problems, how to determine what might have influenced the problem, how to look at symptoms and determine a root cause, and so forth.

An isolated incident may be written off as a fluke.  If you can't reproduce it, it's tough to understand.  But when the same thing happens to hundreds of people, and each of them is able to resolve it by manually removing ZoneAlarm from their hard drive and registry, I'd hardly call that a dubious problem created by the user.  The only thing dubious is ZoneAlarm's product.