I downloaded and installed ZONEALARM Free , hoping it would work with WINDOWS 7. It seemed to work with Firefox and Thunderbird but every time I tried to use IE8 it would cause my rig to lock up. I tried Ctrl-Alt-Del to no avail, Alt+F4, no go, Esc, still nothing. Every time I ended up having to use the reset BUTTON to reboot. I really like Zonealarm but this just will not do. Does anyone know of a fix for this? (Ha ha in advance, don't use IE8 isn't an OPTION)ZoneAlarm even the free version is compatible with Windows 7.
Be sure you download the link from here:
http://download.zonealarm.com/bin/free/1025_en/zaSetup_91_007_002_en.exe

We use the paid version of ZA at the non profit where I work and have no compatibility problems with IE8.

Check your event viewer to see what errors show up in the log:

Start > Control Panel > Adminisitrative Tools > Event Viewer, ...
look to the left and click on Windows logs, and/or Applications & Services Log.

Look for any lines of info. that say warning (yellow triangle) or error (red circle with white x).  Read what it says about that event.  This will tell you what is going on and give you a clue how to begin to fix it.
What av programs do you have running?  Any other firewall?Actually the OS's I spoke of are XP not Windows 7 - my bad.  Too many DIFFERENT pc's there and at home.  ZA and Malwarebytes are only 2 security programs we ran on those pc's.  The firewall we used is ZoneAlarm's.  We are in process of handing this over to a systems analyst so changes are in the works. There are better ways to handle support and security on a network. But there were only 2 when I first started there so it has grown considerably. 

ZoneAlarm has a chat support if you want to contact them specifically about IE8 conflicts:
http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/support/zonealarm-service-support.htm

The Event Viewer logs would still be a very good tool to see what's going on though.