Round 'n Round

One of the error messages I had last night. The Pink Floyd song "Brick in the Wall" came to mind: "If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?"

Had a BUNCH of trouble over the last couple of days; I had d/l the newest ZoneAlarm upgrade and immediately noticed a slowdown in performance. Opening up Task Manager, I noticed the "vsmon" cycling on and off. Knowing that vsmon was the the ZA app., I then tried to stop the process, but because it kept flitting on and off of the list of running programs, I couldn't click on it to stop the program. While it was doing it, the CPU usage went from 0 to 100%. No wonder this computer was slowing down!

Figuring that something must have corrupted the update, I then tried to uninstall ZA, but it wouldn't let me. Being as how I had, prior to the ZA update, d/l Windows Media Player 11, I thought that might have had something to do with it. I had also just d/l the newest version of Firefox, too.

I despised the WMP "upgrade" anyway, so I tried to follow the online instructions on rolling back to WMP 10. No joy.

After rebooting, I was then faced with only a few necessary processes loading; there were no icons on my desktop, no taskbar, no nuthin'.

Long story short, I suddenly found myself without a browser that would work, neither Firefox or IE. I had internet access because my mail program worked, but couldn't get on the internet to find some info. on the problem. Thinking a reboot might work, I tried that (several times) then started getting "NT Authority" error msgs. and having my computer shut down on its own. -sigh-

Won't bore you with the details, but finally got the bright idea (duh!) to rollback to a date before I d/l the newest WMP. That should've helped, but instead it put ZA AND WMP back on this computer so I had to start all over again.

Finally got it all sussed out; am using the Windows Firewall and got my Firefox back up and running (sans my add-ons) so all is well in Mike's World.

For now.