ZoneAlarm Firewall eating RAM

[Asp]

I've been using Zone Alarm on Win2k for many years. It works fine BUT recently I notice that it's eating RAM.

I have 1 GB of RAM which had been quite sufficient.

But the browsers (Opera and FireFox both) are demanding more and more RAM, probably due to Flash, so I looked at what was going on with Process Explorer.

I saw that ZA was using 300+ MB of RAM. (The vsmon.exe process.)

If I loaded any other memory hungry program the system ran out of physical memory and slowed to a crawl.

I uninstalled and reinstalled ZA. Then it was using 4 MB.

But on the second day, it was 6MB.

Then every day more and more. Now it's up to 70 MB.

I use Zone Alarm free, version 5.5.062.011

So, presumably there is a database it's building and for some reason keeping in RAM that is growing without limit. Is there a way to stop this, short of reinstalling once a week?

(I suspect this may be related to my running uTorrent. Most of the alerts shown are for the torrent port.)

Is there another version of ZA that works without this RAM hunger, on Win2k?

Or failing that, is there another free firewall that has a low footprint that won't keep nagging me to buy upgrades?

Edited April 1, 2013 by Asp

[tomasz86]

I use Malware Defender. It's very light (~10MB of RAM). You can find a Windows 2000 compatible version on my website in the Programs section

[Browncoat]

Get Outpost Firewall 2009 at majorgeeks.com

worked for me through unmodified 2000 and when I installed XP

on this machine.