A bug in a Zone Labs update caused firewall crashes late Thursday for about 50,000 users of the popular ZoneAlarm Pro and ZoneAlarm Security Suite products.

The crashes happened after people downloaded the daily Program Advisor update, said Gregor Freund, general manager of Zone Labs, which is part of Check Point Software. Thursday's update contained a bug that had slipped by Zone Labs' quality checks.

"There was somewhat of a process breakdown," Freund said on Friday.

The Program Advisor update is a list of trusted programs that tells the firewall which applications should be allowed to connect to the Internet without user interaction. A new version of the list is produced daily. By default, ZoneAlarm products check on start-up for a new version and download and install it, Freund said.

Most customers who experienced the crashes were in Asia, because it was morning there when the update was first made available and users were starting up their PCs. About 3 million people use ZoneAlarm Pro and ZoneAlarm Security Suite worldwide, according to ZoneLabs's figures.

The faulty update was made available around 4 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday. Zone Labs discovered the issue after customers began reporting crashes. The problem was replicated in the software maker's security lab and resolved within five hours, according to a posting on Zone Labs' Web site.

The company late Thursday posted a corrected Program Advisor update.

The free ZoneAlarm firewall does not include the Program Advisor feature and was thus not affected.

Alright Zone Alarm might not be the best, but then which one is ?

You gave three options

1... Sygate
2... Kerio
3... Outpost

So which one is the best ... and also ... should be free, cause we home junkies dont like wasting money for sitting on our computers and getting fat ( just kiddin )

Now, the best firewall out of the options you gave me

I use ZoneAlarm, glad I didn't get hit. I thinka good firewall is, suprisingly, Microsoft's Anti-Spyware, although it's still in the beta stages, it's very good!

They were not options they were simply what was suggested by "alperuzi"

If You feel there is a better free firewall out there, above Kerio, has you mentioned then please suggest me.

I have been using Zone Alarm for quite sometime now. I am not sure, may be 3 yrs or more, just can't remember.

I have never had any problems with it. Thought the new happening was very weird as i did not hear about any updates available in the first place. Even now the updater shows that the software is upto date. It's set not to update automatically and i do it manually. I really find this weird that it did not detect any new updates and still it is not detecting after the new patches came up.

The only reason i could think of is that i dont use the feature of Zone Alarm. I have set everything to the highest level of security and allow permision on a need basis whenever the software prompts me.

Anyways ill give Kerio a shot today and checkout outputs website, in the mean time let me know which is the best ... in free and paid category.

Thanks