Questions about Zone Alarm

I had Zone Alarm in, after getting it from a link on this board.

I recently took it out because it seemed to interfere with using WMP9 with a streaming audio I wanted to hear. Not sure if that was the problem, but WMP was saying "class not registered" (though it worked okay for playing audio files and cds). I looked in a search and found a place that said Zone Alarm interfered with WMP. So, I took it out and downloaded/installed WMP again, and it worked for what I wanted.

Last night I tried another site (video) and WMP came up, but again I got the message "class not registered". I never did find out what this is and what can be done about it.

Since it doesn't seem to be from Zone Alarm (which I don't have in now) I decided to put it in again.

I went to their site and there's a link to click on to remove spyware and such BEFORE putting Zone Alarm in. a Pre-Scan. It doesn't say if this is free or not?

I've tried several times clicking on it, and it never opens (just keeps showing the hourglass till I give up and close it) I tried right clicking and SAVE TARGET AS and a box came up saying it couldn't be saved because IE can't connect to the site.

The webpage it's on is

http://www.uant.net/firewall/zonealarmguide.html

Is this something that will work at some point, maybe just busy now?

I don't remember doing this before when I put Zone Alarm in, but I can see the value of removing junk before putting in the firewall.

Can I just use Adaware and Spybot first instead?

Just wondering what anyone has to say about this.

Since I haven't had Zone Alarm in, I've checked HiJackThis daily and found several "odd" programs on it. I got so I knew what was supposed to be there and what sounds like something I don't want, so took them out.

Thanks,

Carrie

 

Later:

I got the link open about cleaning the pc first and it's that spyware cleaner that says it will tell you (free) if you have spyware- which is does, but then you have to buy the program to take it out. And, it puts spyware on itself.

Don't know why Zone Alarm would have something like that linked.

For some reason (today) when I click on a link it doesn't open but if I copy/paste the url in the address bar, it does.

I'm going to run Adaware and Spybot and then put Zone Alarm back in.

Just updating this in case anyone finds it sometime in SEARCH.

~ Carrie