Really wanted to like this product, and I do respect the fact that Comodo is making a free FW
that tested so high. But I haven’t had a problem this bad with software in years. Imho, as good as Comodo is, it is not ready for the big time. A software program should never lead to a total system meltdown, even in a minor percentage of cases. It looks like I’m going to have to reformat my laptop to get it to work again, and completely rebuild my system. (I’m writing from my desktop.)
SYSTEM:
Dell Vostro 1000 laptop / AMD Athlon 1.8 dual core / 2GB RAM / 160GB HD
XP SP2
NOD 32 (I saw the NOD problem and many others on freezing - more on this later)
AdWatch 2007
Comodo Firewall 3.whatever the current version is on the website as of the last few days
Been using this system for 8 months, stable as a rock. Was using ZoneAlarm Pro 7.x, and have been using ZAP for many years on my machines. Having seen some reviews of Comodo, I thought I’d give it a shot.
Uninstalled ZAP (rebooted) and installed CFP for the first time two days ago. Read through the PC World (Mag?) review beforehand which discussed cfg’ing it, and I also read a few help files. Enabled Defense+ in the install, and I marked all Applications Safe b/c I keep my systems clean and had scanned everything prior.
Left Comodo and opened FF (3.05b) to surf. Within 2 minutes the system froze. The mouse would move, but nothing was clickable. CTl+Alt+Del / TaskMgr would not work. Had to do a hard shutdown. This happened over and over… After the 3rd or 4th time, I got a BSOD bad pool header. Had enough and uninstalled Comodo, but 2 days later (yesterday) I decided to try again. (Had NOT reinstalled ZAP.)
Had the same issue but worse. Boots into desktop but as soon as everything is loaded, it freezes, leaving the mouse free but useless. Rebooted to SafeMode and used my Start Mgr to uncheck all non-essential programs (including NOD32 and AdWatch 2007). Also disabled CFW. Doesn’t make a difference. When booting to desktop, same freezing issue, and now two more BSODs.
Since you can’t uninstall sftw in SafeMode, the issue was complicated further. (This turned into a lot of work and time for a program I just wanted to try.) I did finally manage to uninstall CFP [I thought] and ran register mechanic to check/repair the registry… but the system STILL froze upon reboot/fully loading all processes, leaving me to think CFP is not fully uninstalled. (I saw the post here with instructions on how to fully uninstall CFP just now. Frankly, it should never be that much work to uninstall a program. And the post has nearly 30,000 views…)
Since my freezing problem would not go away no matter what I did, I tried a repair with original XP SP2 CD… took 40 min and fixed nothing, plus likely overwrote updates I had painstakenly installed over the past 6 months. Whatever conflict Comodo FW caused, I’m at a loss and up sh!t$ creek without a paddle. The only thing I have left to do is reformat the drive and rebuild my system, which will take days. I have my desktop backed up, but hadn’t gotten around to backing up the laptop yet. If I have to go this route, it will be a nightmare.
Of the many posts I read in this forum on freezing, one was due to a PowerPoint problem, another to a recent update on a network card driver, and yet another to NOD32 issuing a bad db update that misidentified cfp as a virus… to name a few. I did not get any NOD notice myself, but who knows.
I realize freezing is a problem that can be caused by many many things, but I don’t usually see so MANY posts about freezing. In fact, I can’t remember ever having problems like this since the 90s when conflicts were common, usually caused by SB device drivers and modem interrupt assignments.
So although I appreciate the efforts of Comodo, and I do applaud them, I was very dissapointed in the result, in my case. I am open to suggestions as I loathe reformatting the drive… thanks for reading.