That is part of the zone alarm free package now and it has an option at install to check to install that or uncheck to not install it. Most of the tech forums are saying do not install it because it will install the ask.com tool bar which has some complaints against it. See here info on ask.com And it seems to cause some problems with some types of webmail. I have seen reports of it killing yahoo mail in firefox. here is a link to the zone alarm forums regarding the spyblocker and the toolbar and instructions on how to delete it. info from zone alarm I also found a report on techguy forum someone saying that once they had that spyblocker it caused their pc to freeze when trying to view images and when it was deleted that stopped. All in all I am seeing a lot of issues related to that BHO spyblocker with ask.com so I think I would say don't install it and if you do have it go to Control Panel> add remove programs> wait for the list then find the zone alarm spyblocker >select it to hilight it then hit the remove button.

That is not the case for most users, have you done the registration? did you try a reboot? here is the evidence that the new versions can be moved to high. this is the free This is a post from dslr from a user that had his show no high option also and what his experience was "I continued playing with this and wanted to update folks based on this. I downloaded revo uninstaller to help me remove ZA. As I was playing with ZA, I noticed that I now had high security set in ZA! What?!! Where before it would not let me change the setting from medium to high (it displayed a message saying this was only available in ZA Pro) now it was automatically set to High! I looked at the version info to be sure ZA did not somehow give me a PRO version. Still shows free version, but now I can set it to HIGH security. I don't know what changed, except perhaps the "registration" took place between these two settings. I agreed to register this free version, and all I can think of is sometime after I installed/rebooted/ran it, the registration completed and ZA now allows me to set the security to high. This is really odd behavior. Right now i am running ver. 7.0.483.00 and it is now letting me run stealth mode (I think!). I am going to do some tests to see that stealth mode is actually enabled. Will post an update if I find that is not the case. Sorry if I caused a ruckus, but I have never seen any FW do something like this. Has anyone else see this particular issue?" so it does go to high. this is the suite on high

I posted the link to the other thread for you so that you could go in there and get the link to the actual fixed version of zone alarm, from that thread here is the link that you would have found there. Download and install the latest versions which solve the loss of internet access problem here under that Recommended actions it has the links to every single version of the zone alarm updates if you use the free that would be the basic firewall. If you click on that link there it gives you the actual exe to download. What you were looking at on the site you posted was a trial for the zone alarm security suite NOT the free one, if you just look over to the right on that page there is a button for the basic firewall only UPDATE that is what you would want and when you hit that it gives the exe also.

unfortunately it is not the first time zonealarm has chosen some really bad marketing methods, they did one of these type some time back and of course the adding of the toolbars in the free version has had it put in the Hall of Shame for a while now. It is still a very good firewall and free is nice but I am sure many will leave them due to their methods. As to other free firewalls Online Armor and Outpost are good options. here is a list from Gizmo's Best Free Firewall I will add this, I and several others in the security community no longer recommend Comodo due to some of their business practices, so consider that before choosing it and you can of course do some research on that to find out more info. Corrine had several good write up's on her blog.