Zone Alarm accessing registry every 10 seconds

Dec 11, 2004 5 Replies

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Sean Bartleet 21 years ago

Hi,

I have just downloaded sysinternals Regmon and have found that a process called VSMON.EXE:176 is accessing my registry every 10 seconds. It appears to be looking for a current version of a virus program. It would appear that VSMON.EXE belongs to Zone Alarm. When I disable the Zone alarm antivirus monitoring VSMON.EXE reduces its registry access from 27 accesses to 4 accesses each 10 seconds.

I do have AVG antivirus software installed but it would appear that Zone alarms does not recognise this. Is there a way of getting Zone alarm to recognise AVG? or should I just turn the virus monitoring off?

Still Zone alarms is trying to access registry entry HKU\\.DEFAULT\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Internet Settings\\EnableAutodial which does not exist. Is there a way to stop Zone alarms trying to turn AutoDial on?

Any assistance will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Sean

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Kerodo 21 years ago

When ZoneAlarm added that AV monitoring, that was the most ridiculous thing they've ever added to the firewall. It's amazing. What in the world will they think of next..

ZA only recognizes a few of the major AVs I'm afraid. And I don't think there's anything you can do about it. Nor about the registry access.

If you're hooked on ZA, you might just go back to an older version like

4.5 or 4.0. There's considerably less crap in the older versions, although there still is useless stuff in them too. At least in the Pro version. The free versions may be a little less bloated..

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Kerodo 21 years ago

By the way, there ARE many other free firewalls out there. If you're dissatisfied with ZA you might check out some others. See the link below:

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Ma No 21 years ago

I have your setup too, and ZoneAlarm doesn't see AVG, but I don't think it matters, and I turned off the ZoneAlarm monitoring of AVG. If you have Windows XP and SP2, Windows will monitor AVG.

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Jester6 21 years ago

Interesting. Do you know that the the ":176" means? Could it be a port number? According to

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that's "Name: genrad-mux Purpose: GENRAD-MUX", but I have no idea what that means. Ports rhymes with sports, but that's about all I know about ports... :)

I turned it off. It seems like a useless, redundant operation. AVG monitors itself.

I don't have Regmon, so can't test it myself... Do you have your preferences set to check for ZA updates manually or automatically? Also you might temporarily disable all program permissions; maybe one of them is the culprit.

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Jester6 21 years ago

Thanks. That link lists 53 free firewalls, which is interesting, but nobody can evaluate that many! For example I tried Kerio but found it too technical. I seem to recall trying Sygate too, but can't remember for sure. Then I settled on ZA because it's easy to use and automatic. I don't have the knowledge, time, or interest to setup complicated protocol & port permissions.

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