I have been experiencing increasingly frequent, spontaneous, system freezes with ZoneAlarm 2.6.362. Sounds similar to what you've been experiencing.

I'm running NT Workstation 4.0 w/ SP5 with all MS security patches. I also use Norton AV NT 5.0 - with virus signatures of 12FEB03, Spyblocker 4.75. I've disabled Diskeeper. I've installed the latest cumulative security fix for IE 5.5. ZA Local security is set to low; internet security is high. I've disable ZA Mailsafe and I've disabled ZA automatic internet lock. I minimized the functions that ZA has to execute, thinking that might solve the problem. It hasn't.

Intermittently, but frequently, the system freezes so solidly it won't respond to anything - not mouse, not keyboard, not even the on/off switch on the front of the computer. I have to toggle the on/off switch at the back of the computer to get it to turn off.

To try to diagnose the problem I've been using IE with all other applications shut down. The problem correlates with IE use. It happens when I'm looking at CNN, using Google, and on Microsoft.com - where I went to see if they had any KB articles that mentioned "system freeze" or "system crash". Amusingly, they don't! MS systems don't freeze or crash, don't you know!!

In tracking possible hacker related sources of the problem, using Google, I followed links to www.nssolution.com which opened http://www22.brinkster.com/nssitech/index.html That URL froze my system. I rebooted and tried it again and my system again froze. Doing research with Sam Spade I found it may well be a hacker forum. Hmmm ….

Sometimes I get a record in the event log "IAMDB.RDB.was.improperly.shut.down", as described in a previous post, sometimes I don't. Once I got a True Vector Process error:

"OpenProcessError.5:.on.process.ID.28,.named.CONIN$."

I'm wondering what's going on? If you have had success in resolving your problem I'd appreciate learning what worked for you. Any and all help will be appreciated.