Re: ZoneAlarm no longer has memory after reboot - please help

From: David (davidwnh@adelphia.net)
Date: 10/12/02 

From: "David" <davidwnh@adelphia.net>
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 03:20:01 GMT

I would have to severely disagree. Most programs will only lose the "data"
changes made after the last "save" they did when it crashes. Windows and a
lot of programs that save configuration settings to the registry will lose
new settings if windows crashes, because specific hives of the registry are
not saved until you properly log out of or shutdown windows.
When windows shuts down it sets a flag to indicate that it has shutdown
properly. When restarting, windows looks at this flag and if your file
system is FAT(32) it will do a scandisk if the flag doesn't indicate the
previous session to have ended properly. It doesn't really have anything to
do with data and cannot correct bad data, it only suspects file system
corruption and can only correct file system errors. This doesn't happen with
NTFS because NTFS uses journaling.

In ZA you can click "accept" and you can still lose changes. "Memory loss",
database corruption , bug....call it what you will, but in any case it
shouldn't be happening and wouldn't if the program was written properly.
Yes it is due to database corruption, but this would not happen if this part
of the program was properly implemented, and it is not fixed in versions
later than 2.6. Doing a clean install may help prevent one of the reasons
this problem exists, but it certainly does not eliminate it. Not to mention
you are really not given the opportunity to do a clean install when
upgrading. Whether you select clean install or not it is never truly a clean
install. So much crap is left behind in the registry, program folder and
system folder that a clean upgrade is a crap shoot at best.

I can only guess as to what actually causes the "corruption" without
actually having the source code. There are serious contentions between ZA
and other applications and system files at boot time and somewhere in there
lies at least one of the problems. It may only be that the True Vector
Engine is timing out because so many other things are vying for CPU time at
startup. Only someone with the source code could truly know.

The fact is this is a poorly written program.
I like to refer to this kind of thing as the perpetual beta test. Anyone
using this program is a guinea pig at best. They try to sell you what should
be a Beta(or maybe even an Alpha). Their phone starts ringing off the hook
so they scurry to fix a problem. In attempting to cure the original problem
the fix causes several more problems..And the phone never stops
ringing....and so on and so forth.

"mhicaoidh" <mhic_aoidh@hotmail.NïX.com.SPäM> wrote in message
news:p2Jp9.7399$Fz.16054@rwcrnsc51.ops.asp.att.net...
> Taking a moment's reflection, YLW mused:
> |
> | It would be nice if ZoneAlarm did not require a proper shutdown to
> | save changes. If changes were saved out right away (or, at idle),
> | memory loss would be reduced significantly, I think.
>
> Just about every program will not save data properly if improperly
> shutdown ... this is why you get the scandisk if you improperly shutdown
> Windows. I'm sure you are familiar with the "X program will be shut down,
> and you will lose any unsaved data" messages when other programs crash.
> The issue isn't "memory loss" anyway. It is database file corruption.
> It was a problem mainly in the 2.6 series of ZA, and was corrected in the
> 3.0 release. People that experience it in versions higher than 2.6 likely
> kept their old 2.6 database files when upgrading rather than doing a clean
> (recommended) install.
>
>

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