Avast 5 w/Webshield enabled and ZoneAlarm causes BSOD

[biggerslickone]

I am not blaming Avast as it has been fine so far, actually the best so far. ZA by itself on my machine crashed it multiple times, forces you to updates or deactivates itself leaving you without a firewall...heh! AVG has done damage by itself and comodo became a nightmare with all their stuff. These are just the facts, not fiction. People should avoid these apps like the plague especially ZA unless they like suffering. Glad you are having no troubles, but many others have and it again, as I try to explain to a ZA fanboy, was not their computers, but rather ZA's major fault. That is it in a nutshell. Push ZA all you want, I just want other folks to know how bad it has been so they don't have to SUFFER! Have a nice day!

[Lisandro]

My personal opinion: Comodo Internet Security (CIS) has much more to offer than ZoneAlarm.
I've used ZoneAlarm for years. It was the best free firewall imho. When they start the paid version, the software become a bloatware.
Besides, I've followed some problems with the Zonelabs support team and get disappointed: they do not acknowledge and they do not help.
The lack of support, the bloatwarism, the presence of much better options made me give up on ZA.

But I admit, when someone wants an easy firewall, ZA is an option. I recommend it when people asks for freeware firewalls.
Personally, I use AIS (and CIS in virtual machines, as I have only one license for AIS).

[biggerslickone]

My personal opinion: Comodo Internet Security (CIS) has much more to offer than ZoneAlarm.
I've used ZoneAlarm for years. It was the best free firewall imho. When they start the paid version, the software become a bloatware.
Besides, I've followed some problems with the Zonelabs support team and get disappointed: they do not acknowledge and they do not help.
The lack of support, the bloatwarism, the presence of much better options made me give up on ZA.

But I admit, when someone wants an easy firewall, ZA is an option. I recommend it when people asks for freeware firewalls.
Personally, I use AIS (and CIS in virtual machines, as I have only one license for AIS).

Actually in many respects I agree with you. ZA was at one time a very stable and great product as I noted. In those days I had no issues and would recommend it easily. Over about the last 5 years or so, it has gotten very bad. When people say its great, good for them. Unfortunately what I experienced was not my machine's fault, but rather I would learn it was the ZA fault cause many others had similar or the very same issues, and I would discover that after several days offline.

Comodo looks great is well packaged, but they release updates that are bad. They let bad updates go out fast and bang, your computer gets disabled. With AVG it was great at one time too. But they grew it into a sort of free spam-ware and then made it so bloated that it finally either crashed a system, made the HD spin consistently slow killing the life of my drive, got false alarms on software that was perfectly fine, again causing me hours of trying to spend my valuable time finding out that AVG had a false alarm and finally trashing a system file that completely killed my computer from starting up. All of these apps are bad, and I would tell anyone trying to use them, stay away unless you want depressing headaches and a computer that doesn't work or worse.

[johnb1]

I have been using Avast (4 & now 5) and ZA Free and later ZA Pro for over 3 years now. I started out with Avast 4.8, ZA Free and XP. Later while still using XP, I upgraded to ZA Pro. Then last year I bought a new Dell computer with Vista. On this PC, I started out with Avast 4.8 and ZA Pro. I later upgraded to Avast 5. In all this time I never had a BSOD caused by Avast or ZA. I have had serveral minor problems that were quickly resolved by each software tech reps or thru their forums.

regards
johnb
Vista Home Premium, SP2, 64Bit, Dell 435T, 6GB RAM, WD 1.5 TB External HD, IE8, Avast Antivirus 5.0, Spybot S&D, ZoneAlarmPro, Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, Windows Defender, Windows Malicious Software Removal, SuperAntiSpyware, Spyware Blaster, cCleaner, Glary Utilities, Speccy and Dialup.

[GloobyGoob]

To me, AVG was the worst AV I used. 

[rdmaloyjr]

My personal opinion: Comodo Internet Security (CIS) has much more to offer than ZoneAlarm.
I've used ZoneAlarm for years. It was the best free firewall imho. When they start the paid version, the software become a bloatware.
Besides, I've followed some problems with the Zonelabs support team and get disappointed: they do not acknowledge and they do not help.
The lack of support, the bloatwarism, the presence of much better options made me give up on ZA.

But I admit, when someone wants an easy firewall, ZA is an option. I recommend it when people asks for freeware firewalls.
Personally, I use AIS (and CIS in virtual machines, as I have only one license for AIS).

There is one bad thing about ZA I have to agree with you, poor to non existent support. :'(

Fortunately ZA Pro & ZA Free need little to no support.