In an effort to bend Microsoft?s Vista to my will I?ve replaced the default firewall with Zonelabs ZoneAlarm. For those unfamiliar with ZoneAlarm it has the interesting feature of checking not only incoming traffice, but also outgoing traffic. Also, whenever an unauthorized program attempts network access the user is prompted on whether to allow or not allow the communication and whether the permission is temporary or permanent.
Last night during a defrag of Vista ZoneAlarm issued what was probably the most unusual prompt that I?ve ever seen in the eight years that I?ve used it:
?Disk Defragmenter is attempting to access the Internet.?
The only legitimate for this that I can think of is that the program is trying to defrag the Internet as well as my hard drive. While this isn’t likely, it would explain the excessive amount of time that it takes to defrag.
