Today, I sat down at my laptop (which has been running for the last two days). After working for a while (1/2 hour or so), I was confronted with a notice about Incompatible software, dealing with ZoneAlarm.
I’ve researched this on the forums, and can’t find anything that is quite the same as what I’m seeing (okay, the panel & warning is the same, except … I don’t have zonealarm installed!!).
Why would I be getting this warning without zonealarm installed?
What firewall do you have ?
The only way you should get this warning is if you have or had Zone Alarm installed ?
Whilst I don’t know exactly what avast looks for but, it may be registry entries and they could have been left behind after an uninstall.
In any case Just answer No to the question and that will be the last you would see of the warning and it doesn’t do anything to the avast set-up and primarily the Web Shield provider.
What other security based software do you have that might include a firewall ?
Perhaps something from your ISP, which may use ZA under license but by a different name.
I’ve never had ZoneAlarm installed; I use just the default Windows firewall, coupled with Proxomitron as a local web proxy. Nothing from my ISP.
What’s interesting is that this is the first time this has come up, having run Avast on this laptop since I got it some 18 months (or so) ago. No recent changes by me.
Have you read the following in our "FAQ"s :
Q: On my PC I am running another HTTP proxy (e.g. Proxomitron, WebWasher ...).
It is listening on localhost and on port 3128 (or any other port).
If I set-up ‘Web Shield’ to monitor the proxy port, and uncheck the “Ignore local communication” checkbox, it works correctly but I want Web Shield to scan downloads even before my HTTP proxy. Is this possible?
A: Only processes that are known not to cause troubles are filtered by Web Shield. These include common browsers and many other tools already identified as compatible with Web Shield. Unfortunately your HTTP proxy software is currently not on our approved list. You can however add it manually by editing the avast4.ini file.
Open the file avast4.ini located in C:\PROGRAM FILES\ALWIL SOFTWARE\AVAST4\DATA in Notepad.
Find the section [WebScanner]
In this section add the following line:
OptinProcess=my_proxy.exe
(Replace the my_proxy.exe value with the real process name of your proxy app.) If the OptinProcess line is already present in the avast4.ini file, you can add another process name to the list by separating them by commas. E.g.:
OptinProcess=my_proxy.exe, my_browser.exe
Restart the Web Shield provider - terminate and then start again
Note: Web Shield will monitor and intercept all outgoing connections from the HTTP proxy application. Do not use this method when the proxy does not “speak” the HTTP protocol. E.g.: it does not connect directly to Internet Web servers but is used to provide compression or encryption to the data stream. (This might include all kinds of Internet accelerators)"
While I defer to the experience of others here I doubt that avast does any checking for ZoneAlarm except at system startup, so I would be very surprised if this “incompatibility” message had anything to do with avast.
good to hear that you like the Comodo firewall. Perhaps you can give us some more information on how your post helps move forward the issue of this thread, otherwise your post has no relevance to this thread and clearly belongs elsewhere.
Well, maybe you have and don’t even know about it
I mean, some applications contain ZoneAlarm (or at least part of it) internally. For example, I have some Cisco VPN client installed and it’s exactly the case.
Why the detection occurs so late during the runtime, I don’t know however… question for Lukor.
An excellent point, and an extremely relevant one, as I was running the cisco vpn client at the time… I think. I’ve had the client installed for quite a while, but only had the need to run it the other day.
Fascinating. Now it makes sense … that the cisco vpn software contains zonealarm.