I need a firewall. Not zonealarm.

[Sgt._Stacker]

Zonealarm is great.. i love it.. but sadly i must part from it because vsmon.exe continues to use 100% of my CPU when uploading files.. to anywere on any browser.. if somone knows a way to fix this enlighten me. but otherwise is there anything just as good or better for free?

[CBMatt]

This seems to be a common problem with more recent versions of ZoneAlarm.  Are you using 6.5 or greater?  One thing you can try is...

1. Reboot into Safe Mode.
2. Navigate to C:\Windows\Internet Logs
3. Delete backup.rdb and iamdb.rdb
3. Reboot into Normal Mode.

This will reset the database and hopefully help out some.  I've heard that disabling Mailsafe improves things a bit, but you'll probably want to avoid to doing that.  If the above doesn't work, we'll try something else.  The last stable version was 6.1.744, so you can uninstall your current version and install that version.  Of course, the included uninstall.exe is crap, so you'll need to do the following (you might want to print this out)...

1.  Download 6.1.744.  Don't install it yet!  And if you don't already have it, download and install CCleaner (don't install the Yahoo! toolbar).
2.  Reboot in Safe Mode.
3.  Go to Start > Programs > Zone Labs
4.  Right-click on Uninstall Zone Labs Security and go to Properties.
5.  Next to Target, it should say something like "C:\Program Files\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\zauninst.exe".  You'll want to add a space to the end of that and type /clean.  ("C:\Program Files\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\zauninst.exe" /clean)
6.  Run Zone Alarm and make sure the Load On Boot option is disabled.  Close the program.
7.  Run the uninstaller (Start > Programs > Zone Labs > Uninstall Zone Labs Security) and OK whatever security alerts come up and click Yes when prompted to delete the files.
8.  Navigate to the following folders and delete them: C:\Windows\Internet Logs, C:\Windows\system32\Zonelabs, and C:\Program Files\Zone Labs.  Empty your Recycle Bin.
9.  Run CCleaner to clean out any extra temp files and registry entries (you'll need to go to Issues for registry stuff).
10.  Reboot into Normal Mode and install 6.1.744.
11.  Reboot again if necessary and cross your fingers.

Now, if that doesn't work, then it really isn't worth it and you should start looking around for another decent firewall.  It's possible that malware is involved, as I've heard that Backdoor.delf can be troublesome in this issue, so you might want to update your anti-virus (I really hope you have one), reboot into Safe Mode, and do a full system scan.  It's also possible that there could be another program interferring and causing this jump in memory usage.  Spyware Detector is known for doing this.  Anyway...I hope I've helped you in some way.  If you have any questions, feel free to ask.