HELP!!! big computer woes

I have Zone Alarm firewall and a few days ago I got a notice to upgrade to the newer, more secure version Truns out its a very unstable version ...too bad ZA didn't mention that. Their forum is fulll of complaints and silence from the ZA people.

My vsmon.exe fil keeps getting bigger and bigger and gobbling Virtual Memory. After 30 minutes online, my commit charge is in excess of 1000MB.
Thank god I got a recent upgrade of RAM although I wish I had moe now. *SIGH*
The client.exe file onlt initializes, stalls or freezes and re-initializes. It never loads the ZoneAlarm TRAY ICON, so I cannot shut the blasted thing down to uninstall it. I cannot uninstall while it running and the vsmon.exe files are still running. I feel like a mouse on a wheel.

Mind you I spent over seven hours at this, and some of that time trying to figure out WTF was wrong. Who woulda figured it would be software that supposed to keep ou safe...hahahahahahahahahaha.

Tomorrow, I am off to buy a firewall router.
No Mac comments, PLEASE. If I had that kind of money, I'd be buying that tomorrow instead.

Does anyone know if I can stop that vsmon.exe process in the task manager, WITHOUT harming my computer? Once I have the router installed, I don't need to rely on the blasted thing. I can set the WinXP SP2 firewall, and be done with it.
Any other way to get rid of this crap? If I can shut it down, I should be able to uninstall ZA? And go and find any files and delete them?
Maybe get a freebie software fireall to monitor my outgoing stuff? Any suggestions for a firewall for this? I know I just had this discussion here about routers, etc. Too bad I decided to wait



[edit on 14-8-2005 by DontTreadOnMe]

yep you can do it from task manager, and no ill effects

[edit on 14/8/2005 by Sauron]

Sauron, thanks for that. I have since found out I can end processes with WinPatrol.
I'm happy to hear that ending vsmon.exe will have no ill effects.

DTOM, there is a know issue with ZA 6.X. You need to do a full uninstall of your old one, reboot and install the new one. It really is a better program. It not only watches ports, but also looks at process's to alert u if something does not seem right. NO, I don't work for or know anyone who works for ZA. I just have used their free products and have found them very good.

Luckilly I decided to stick with the free trial of the pro version. I usually don't but I'm liek what the heck. Hopefully they fix it.

I think you can do a RUN>winconfig and change the windows startup settings so that program doesn't even start rather than start and then a task manager shut down.

Would be one of the easiest methods.