It has been my practice to perform a ‘thorough’ Scandisk every week or two. I close all programs using CTL-ALT-DEL and ‘End Task’. This is a particularly tedious task, and I have been wondering if there is any way of doing it easier? Even more urgent recently I cannot run ScanDisk because some program is writing to the disk. How can I find out what program is writing to the disk and then remove the problem? Recently the system has gotten slow and started to hang, so I believe there may be some nasty on the machine. However, these troubles only started after going on ZoneAlarm. The computer is running Windows Me and is protected by Vet virus checker and ZoneAlarm Pro.

I find the best way to run ScanDisk is through Windows Safe Mode. In this mode, only essential services and device drivers are loaded, meaning that no background programs should interfere with the running of ScanDisk. There is really no advantage I know of running ScanDisk in Windows Normal mode as opposed to Windows Safe Mode, so it should achieve the same goal but with less problems. To start in Safe Mode, reboot the computer and when the ‘Starting Windows Me’¦’ message appears (just before the Windows splash screen) start tapping the F8 key. When the Windows boot menu appears, select ‘Safe Mode’ and press ENTER. Once Windows has loaded, run ScanDisk. To restart Windows in Normal mode once ScanDisk has completed, just restart the computer.

It is good to see you are running a virus scanner and firewall, as it would be insane to run any internet-connected computer without firewall protection. It’s possible that some nasties (e.g. malware - a collective term for viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, etc.) placed themselves on your computer before you installed ZoneAlarm, and now because they can no longer function in their intended way are causing problems. In situations such as this, the first thing we should try is to run Ad-Aware (www.lavasoft.de) and Spybot Search & Destroy (www.safer-networking.org). These free utilities will scan your hard drive specifically for adware and spyware, and attempt to remove any instances of these which are found. It would also be advisable to run a virus scan to check for any viruses which may have installed themselves on your computer. Before doing this make sure you update your virus scanner with the latest definition files.

If you continue to have problems, it may be worthwhile trying to reinstall ZoneAlarm. Disconnect from the internet and use the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ control panel to uninstall ZoneAlarm. Once the uninstallation has finished, go to the C:WindowsInternet Logs directory and delete the follow files (if they exist): IAMDB.RBD and BACKUP.RDB. By deleting these files your ZoneAlarm configuration details will be lost (e.g. programs and their related security settings) so you will need to reconfigure permissions for programs once you have reinstalled ZoneAlarm. Now, you should reinstall ZoneAlarm. Make sure you do not connect to the internet until ZoneAlarm is running, otherwise you will be unprotected from threats. Please let me know how this goes and if you need any further assistance.