I’m not much of a fan of zone alarm…Mostly, because of past things including the former interface being way too simple (I think that has been fixed since).

Ok off the rant. No one asked this question so I’m going to ask before you dump a solution you like. What does Event viewer say about the situation?

If you go in and clear all the event viewer logs. Then reboot and look at them to see exactly what is failing. If you are not sure what you are looking at you can post you results here and you should have a lot more input.