Give your overzealous security software the boot
About five years ago I installed the family version of Symantec's Norton Internet Security software on one of my PCs, rendering the machine unusable. Not only couldn't I get any access to the Internet, it was impossible to uninstall the program. I ended up having to reinstall the operating system and all my applications--except Norton Internet Security. At the time I said I would never again install a Symantec security program on any PC, but about a year ago I bought a PC that came with 90 days of Norton 360, and the program won me over. When the free trial period was over I even coughed up $80 for a year's subscription. Apart from the frequent nags about my need to back up (I prefer to use my own manual backup strategy), I'm happy with the Norton 360.
Now the other side of the coin: I've used CheckPoint's ZoneAlarm firewall--both the free and pro versions--for many years, and on many different PCs. The program would occasionally prevent a legitimate program from performing some operation, but on those rare instances I merely shut the firewall down long enough to complete the task, and then turned it back on. No problem.
Until this morning, that is. I spent four hours trying to update a Web site via ftp, only to be told that access to my ISP's ftp server was denied. I tried using the WS_FTP Pro ftp program, Windows Explorer, Firefox, and even a WYSIWYG Web editor, but nothing could get through to the server. I could access the remote system on another PC on my network, but I wanted to avoid having to move the files in question to that PC to complete the transfer. Just last week I had ftp'ed some files without a problem.
After several calls to my blameless ISP, a tech suggested that I uninstall ZoneAlarm. Not just shut it down (which I had already tried), but completely uninstall the app. This struck me as somewhat extreme, but after spending so much time trying to figure out the glitch, I thought it was worth a try. And what do you know: as soon as ZoneAlarm was off the system, I could access the ftp server without a hitch.
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