Zonealarm Peeves

I always use a firewall, and the one I use is Zonealarm, the free version. It does everything I want it to do, and does so unobtrusively & effectively. The company releases periodic updates and these usually install without a problem. "Usually" -- that's the key word. Every couple of years one of the updates fails. The update yesterday was one of those. I did the usual "Update." Crash. Couldn't even get online again. Then I tried "Clean Install" -- crash. I ran the Control panel uninstall and the did a clean reinstall. Crash. Yes, I rebooted between steps. Finally, I manually edited the registry and deleted every reference to Zonelabs and manually deleted every file & folder associated with the program, and then ran a clean reinstall. Success, yes, but at the cost of two hours labor ... I still haven't found a replacement firewall I could live with, but I do wish some updates were a matter of two steps forward and three back. (Me) (Blacktail Books)