[antoliva]

Hi
I have a Pentium4 with WindowsXP pro, update 2.
More than a year ago I had the bad idea to install a free version of Zone Alarm firewall.
When the year time expired the program stop working.
A new version of it was not possible to install due to a file VSPUBAPI.dll that was not found. The file does exist in the system but I don't know where the bloody ZA program want it to be. So I decided to get rid of this unfriendly program and install a different firewall.
But now I can't even completely remove the old program from my PC.
There is a folder in Windows/System32 called Zonelab which is full of files and no one of them can be deleted or renamed, the folder can not be deleted, renamed or relocated. Even in the register there are Zone Alarm keys which can not be removed!!
I have printed some instructions from the ZA online forum to do the whole removal but nothing work. I got error messages saying that the access is denied or that the disk is full, or that the program is been used.
During the process of cleaning up the register I could remove without problems all remaining keys of Norton, CA antivirus and other programs I have deleted from my PC some time ago, but ZA can not be touched!! IT OWNS MY COMPUTER!!
There might be a way to get rid of this pest, perhaps by editing the files and scramble them so they can be deleted after, but I do not know how to get to OPEN a file to edit it. I used to do that many years ago with DOS programs.
Please help. Thank you
Toni :(

[NeedKarma]

ZA is actually a well respected free program so this surprises me. Have you tried rebooting into safe Mode to remove the files. If that works then use a good registry cleaner like CCleaner to clean up the entries.

[antoliva]

Thank you needkarma, I'll try that. I will tell you later how was it.
Toni

[Curlyben]

A word of warning.
To remove ZA you MUST use their inbuilt uninstaller.
Using Add/Remove causes untold damage and then you'll need to rebuild your computer.

[antoliva]

Thank you Curlyben, I did't mention that the very first thing I did was to try to unistall from ZA itself, after that I tried to uninstall from Control Panel, both of them failed giving me error messages. Was for that reason that I tried to remove manually. Anyway, there is something very annoying in ZA which does not happen with other programs, I have been installing and uninstalling programs from a PC for over 15 years and I have never seen any thing like this before. I am not an expert in computers, but I have been everywhere just following instructions from computer's magazines.
Toni

[Arimmus]

Problem with some of ZA is that when they cannot validate a freaking dll file and because of that it can't be uninstalled. Tried everything to fix problem (including reaching deep into registry and removing it from there (Yeah even regedit can't remove the damn reg files). Frustration sets in.