Is There A Conflict Between Firefox 3.5.7 & Opera 10.10?

[HuskyPup]

The past couple of weeks or so on start up my Opera asked me, via Zone Alarm, if it could act as a server. Initially I allowed this but now I do not however the same problem seems to be occurring when I have had Opera open for a while at the same time as Firefox.

Opera goes into not responding mode and Firefox doesn't want to do anything whatsoever! All my other programmes run completely normal.

Even if I close Firefox down ccleaner tells me it still open however according to task manager there's nothing open and to make things worse I have to force a system shut down since it won't do so by itself.

The past couple of days I've been working without using opening Opera however today I needed to use it and once again I had to force a system shut down.

Is anyone else experiencing this bizarre behaviour?

[KenB]

I've been using Opera 10.10 and Firefox 3.5.7 side by side at the same time extensively with no problems.

[HuskyPup]

It's only the past couple of weeks or so that this problem has arisen on my office Vista PC. I've had a good search around the net and some people have posted not responding situations with all types of resolutions but this issue seems to be unique to me!

I can't seem to replicate it on any other machine at the moment, mostly xp, however I have a couple of new machines arriving later in the week so I'll see what happens with them.

[KenB]

I'm using WinXP and have never noticed the problem you describe. I don't have ZoneAlarm installed because I'm behind a hardware firewall and ZoneAlarm was always causing me problems. Have you tried disabling ZoneAlarm and using Windows Firewall instead to see if it is ZoneAlarm that is causing the problem?

[HuskyPup]

Have you tried disabling ZoneAlarm

Yep, no difference, it's quite bizarre in that Firefox is seemingly closed and when Opera is not responding I cannot get it to disappear whatsoever, certainly task manager won't close it down.

The last few days I've deliberately not opened Opera and had no problems, this afternoon I've had it open and there I was again forcing a shut down.

[kaled]

There is a known incompatibility between Firefox, Vista and ZoneAlarm that requires a system reset because Firefox cannot be closed even with task manager. Mozilla blame ZoneAlarm, I blame Firefox. You may have just unearthed some evidence clearing ZoneAlarm (assuming that isn't running when either browser is open).

Kaled.

[KenB]

To be honest, the quality of ZoneAlarm has gone down over the years and I have been finding it to cause more and more problems. I'm certain that Mozilla is correct, ZoneAlarm is the problem. I finally ended up uninstalling it from all my computers and all kinds of problems went away. Its memory leaks are horrendous.

[Brett_Tabke]

Try turning off Opera's webserver (Unite) and disable syncing.

[HuskyPup]

Interesting KenB, I have to say that I have ZASS running on about 20 machines and apart from one particular update about 3-4 years ago, ZA has never given me a problem.

Brett I'll give that a go since it's only been happening the past few weeks and that was after it requested to act as a server...I know I shouldn't have said OK!

[KenB]

It was in the last year that ZoneAlarm started to really cause me problems (on WinXP). Overall it really slowed the system down. I've always seen the memory leak issues and they are well documented. Years ago I used to participate in the Seti@Home project but had to stop shortly after installing ZoneAlarm because after a few days ZA was using so much memory that it would freeze up because of all the requests Seti@Home would make to submit results and get new work units. Even recently if I left my computer running for a number of days I'd have to keep tabs on ZoneAlarm in my task manager to monitor its memory usage.

The day I uninstalled ZoneAlarm from my computers is the day that most of their performance problems went away.

For the record, I run WinXP professional on all my systems.

[kaled]

In my experience, the Zone Alarm firewall is fine, but stay away from all the rubbish that is can come with it. All that is needed is the firewall - switch off everything else.

Kaled.