ZoneAlarm Extreme Security Suite Kills FOF?
 

So I hadn't played FOF2007 since mid-April when I decided Wednesday night to fire it on up. Lo and behold, I would get a brief hourglass then nothing. Tried it a couple more times then I check Solecismic to figure out what to do. I tried to access the eLicense Control Center but that was totally unresponsive too. I followed all the steps on the Product FAQ page except the last one (winnt32.exe from CD). Then I check FOFC and found some things to get eLic to work but FOF still wouldn't.

One of the FAQ suggestions was to turn off you firewall. Well, I had recently upgraded my ZoneAlarm to the Extreme Security Suite and figured that must be the culprit. Shutting it down had no effect.

So Saturday morning I decided I'd restore my laptop to the original factory settings. (Thanks Sony for the partitioned hard drive!) Once it was back to start, I loaded FOF and it worked. I then started loading everything else I need (Mozilla, MS Office, etc.) checking to make sure FOF still worked after each step. And wouldn't you know that ZA ESS killed both FOF and eLic. So I removed ZA ESS, ran the eLic Patch 5, reinstalled FOF and voila! Everything works!

I called ZA to get a refund and explained my problem. The dude there said that because I only have 1G RAM and ESS requires 2G I would have this problem. I called "BS" on him but what do I know, I'm not a computer expert. None of my other programs (including TCY) had problems.

Has anybody else had such problems? Do you think I was being fed a line?

I have seen reports that it also has the same effect on OOTP as well. I haven't really looked at Zone Alarm products too much since they were purchased by Checkpoint, but this is not the first application that I have heard of this problem with.