When I wrote about my Vista woes I mentioned how ZoneAlarm would keep causing Vista’s tcpip.sys driver to BSOD, which forced me to go back to the Windows Firewall. Well, a month had gone by so I figured that I would give ZoneAlarm on Vista SP1 another try. I installed the free version (7.1.254.000) and went a whole week without a single crash! I was happy in thinking the problem had been resolved.
Then on Wednesday I needed to VPN into work to fix a problem … and couldn’t connect. At first I thought that I had just forgotten to configure ZoneAlarm’s trusted zones properly, but the settings all checked out. There was nothing in the firewall logs about any connections being blocked either.
A few Google searches later, I learned that apparently SP1 and some third-party firewalls (like ZA) have broken the VPN client in Vista. There are a lot of posts on Checkpoint’s forums and even MS TechNet about the issue, but there’s no resolution yet.
Well, no resolution except uninstalling ZoneAlarm. š
So that was it … I’ve removed ZA and my VPN connection is working again. It’s back to the Windows Firewall for me until I can find a suitable replacement.
Two months later and this is still broken. Checkpoint is supposedly āworkingā on a fix with Microsoft.