Zone Alarm and my IP settings

Ever since I installed Zone Alarm Firewall, my internet has been acting very obscurely. First, my Windows tells me that I am not connected to a network in "Network and Sharing Center", yet the network Icon at the taskbar shows that I do have a connection.

Now that could be that I am using an external USB wireless, instead of the internal wireless, which I had removed a few days ago.

Second, my internet is slower than ususal, through Firefox and IE, but it is still normal speed when I use File sharing. Windows Firewall is off, but not removed, and no, I will not remove it no matter what!!!

The situation escalated when my network received a permanent DNS error and my Wirless network connection switched to "Local Only" and I could not access the internet no more.

I fixed the problem by using the command "ipconfig /release" and then manually setting up a static LAN IP, which returned my network to where it originally was.

These are my settings as of now (in the picture), and my net is working just fine. But I need to be sure that I will have no more problems like this in the future.

 

Are you using static IP address with DHCP turned on (router)? If so the IP must be outside of the DHCP range.

All I can suggest is check to see if Zone Alarm has the proper settings for zones. You also have control of how sensitive you want, Paranoid or normal ..... If you have the Adware/Spyware active it will slow your PC down.

 

I guess you didn't look at the picture at the bottom, IPconfig says DHCP is off.

ANyways, turned ZoneAlarm off, reset my adapter, then attempted to turn off static IP and return everything to normal. Unfortunately when I set the IPv4 settings to automatic, I had an obscure IPv4 address, that was nowhere close to what it was before all this began, so I re-enabled static IP and everything works fine, and I am thinking of uninstalling Zone Alarm.
On a side note, when I re-enabled static IP, Vista automatically said another PC had the same IP, and I am 100% sure that this is the IP assigned to my computer.

I guess I am stuck with Windows Firewall...I should have known it's the only firewall that can work with Vista!

 

I run Vista Home Premium/SP1 with ZoneAlarm just fine. Which ZA product did you actually install? BTW, ZA has an option to disable the Windows Firewall.

 

Meh, got rid of ZA, and yes, the "Disable Windows Firewall" option was on.
So I am back to W.F., it does its job...

Getting rid of ZA did speed up my internet a whole lot, so I will just cope with W.F. for now.

 

I'm not fond of the the free firewall