DownloadCastle

MS released its usual updates last night, but one of them is affecting some
folks rather poorly. If you're running XP with ZoneAlarm as your firewall,
you might want to avoid these until further notice. One of the updates
released (and I'm not yet sure which one) doesn't play well with that
combination. The result is that you will lose your internet connection,
receive a bunch of errors that point to other things and the only way to get
back to a working system is System Restore, assuming you actually have a
good, recent, working Restore point to fall back on.

Edit: KB951748 seems to be the culprit and the safe solution at the moment is to
uninstall it. You can open a load of ports to let it work in Zone Alarm's
Firewall but that kind of defeats the object of a security update. Good 'ol
Microsoft...

ZoneAlarm + KB951748 = Broken Internet Access

From The Inquirer to DSLReports to our own members, it seems like everyone's talking about the catastrophic combination of current ZoneAlarm products and Microsoft's KB951748 update for Windows XP from this month's Patch Tuesday. The update (MS08-037), ironically enough, is supposed to improve security for the DNS function of Windows. However, when you combine it with the ZoneAlarm firewall (ZoneAlarm Free, ZoneAlarm Pro, ZoneAlarm AntiVirus, ZoneAlarm Anti-Spyware, or ZoneAlarm Security Suite), you lose all network/Internet functionality (update: you might be able to ping servers, but you cannot connect to websites).

Solutions/Workarounds

In the meantime, what should you do? ZoneAlarm recommends one of the following three options:

* Adjust the Internet Zone security slider to Medium
* Uninstall KB951748
* Add your DNS servers to the Trusted Zone

For complete details, see the ZoneAlarm press release. No word yet about an updated version of the security patch from Redmond.

Now, Solutions from ZA

The ZoneAlarm press release now contains links to updated versions of ZoneAlarm products that will solve this problem. Thanks to NBNoG for providing the heads-up, and to all commentors for your feedback and suggestions.

If you have friends or business associates with this problem, do them a favor and give them the word - after all, until they can solve the problem, they can't even find out why it happened!

Be sure to tell us if you've been affected, and if you have any other suggestions.