Yesterday morning I did a post about trying ZoneAlarm’s ForceField software on my system. ForceField places a bar in your browser, in my case Firefox, to monitor the functions of the software. All was working well, so I thought, until last night.

I started to notice that my hard disk was thrashing, which usually indicates that you are out of physical memory and disk swapping is in full swing. I have 1G of RAM on my system using Windows XP. The 1G is usually enough for my system no matter what I do.

So I cranked up Task Manager for a look-see. There I spotted a process ISWLDR.dat using over 214k of memory and climbing. I did a Google which indicated it was a Mozilla process, the makers of Firefox. Strange. I never recalled seeing this process before. So I shut down Firefox, Nada. Next I shutdown ForceField and away went the process.

I do not tolerate any software that sucks the life blood out of my system so off went ForceField and all was well. Oh well.

Hope this helps someone else who may experience the same problem.

To be fair, ForceField is designed to trap malware away from the system, and my guess is that this is done in memory. But at the time the memory usage took off, I was using the same websites that I had used all day and was not surfing any ‘bad sites’. Or am I missing something here?

I also filled out the ZA survey and explained the problem to their tech support people.

Thoughts? Comments welcome.

Tags: zonealarm, forcefield, firefox, memory, process, runaway, high use, uninstalled