I love Mozilla Firefox. I love Zone Labs' Zone Alarm Security Suite. However, Firefox and Zone Alarm seem to have a less-than-amicable relationship. What follows is a real-life account of the trials of this forbidden love, and how I managed to make it work.

As an administrator of a couple of web sites, I often use cPanel to manage and maintain the sites. Recently I've had a problem getting cPanel to load completely. The text would load after about a minute or so, but the images would rarely, if ever, appear. I could still access the bare minimum of what I needed to maintain the sites, but the matter has been frustrating, and an inconvenience, to say the least.

What was odd was that when I loaded cPanel in IE it would appear quickly and completely. This lead me to believe that there was a problem with my beloved Firefox. Having been sworn to Firefox since it was Firebird, this was simply unthinkable.

After viewing and reviewing my Firefox settings, I could find no reasonable explanation for this anomaly. I turned then to my firewall, Zone Alarm. Here I sought out every setting and configuration that I thought might be contributing to the problem. But everything seemed to check out OK. So, hopeless and heartbroken, I turned to the one place that would surely offer some insight to my conundrum. I Googled it.

I realized quickly that mine was not an isolated incident. But while misery loves company, what I needed was answers, not a support group. I discovered that the most favored solution was to simply uninstall Zone Alarm. This, however, was not an option for me. Firstly, because after trying many different firewalls and anti-virus software, Zone Alarm has been the only one that does just what I want it to do (present situation excepted.) Secondly, I pay for three ZA subscriptions, and I'm not about to double that cost just to end up with a product I don't like.

Then, in my darkest hour, I found someone who had the same problem and had apparently found a workable solution. So I followed the simple instructions, then attempted to load cPanel in Firefox, and...voila! It was as if some terrible curse had suddenly been lifted; the veils of animosity lifted from the eyes of my beloved partners. We were one big happy family again. Here is the magical formula that saved us:

• Open Zone Alarm and go to the "Program Control" section.Click the "Programs" tab and find Firefox in the list. Next, right click Firefox and choose "Options." (See fig. 1)
• Once the "Options" are visible, find "Enable Privacy for this program." Uncheck the box and close ZA windows. You're done! (See fig. 2)

The "Privacy" feature is a cookie and pop-up manager, so disabling it should not interfere with normal firewall and anti-virus protection. Besides, Firefox does a pretty good job on its own when it comes to managing ad content. Now I can only hope that the resolution of my crisis will help to serve as a beacon of hope to some other despondent wayfarer.