READ: Faulty update crashes ZoneAlarm firewall

[TechZ]

excerpt:

A bug in a Zone Labs update caused firewall crashes late Thursday for about 50,000 users of the popular ZoneAlarm Pro and ZoneAlarm Security Suite products. The crashes happened after people downloaded the daily Program Advisor update, said Gregor Freund, general manager of Zone Labs, which is part of Check Point Software. Thursday's update contained a bug that had slipped by Zone Labs' quality checks.

The Program Advisor update is a list of trusted programs that tells the firewall which applications should be allowed to connect to the Internet without user interaction. A new version of the list is produced daily. By default, ZoneAlarm products check on start-up for a new version and download and install it, Freund said.

Full story: ZDNet | Zone Labs Update

[Duke of Rezin]

So that's what was causing it. I thought that one of my file cleaners had inadvertently deleted something the system actually needed. I reinstalled ZoneAlarm and that didn't help, but I got around it by turning off the security center and internet connection sharing services. I've never been able to figure out just what benefit the internet connection sharing service imparts as I can share an internet connection just fine with it either on or off.