I've been running for several days as a forced Ultrapeer with no sharing. It's been good, I've been feeling like a worthy contributor to the network and by restricting the bandwidth available to Phex performance hasn't been an issue. Today, however, I came home to find my system extremely sluggish. Vsmon, a service ZoneAlarm uses to monitor web activity, was using 90+% of my CPU! When I blocked Phex from the Internet, that went down near 0%. I tried reducing the number of Ultrapeer, Peer, and Leaf connections by half, and while vsmon activity reduced, it was still utilizing over half the CPU time.

I'm wondering if anyone else has run into this problem, or if there may be suggestions as to how I might reduce it. I'm not prepared to "trust" activity on my listening port, or IP's of known Ultrapeers. I'm wondering if certain configuration options in Phex might be effective in reducing the effort ZoneAlarm must apply to Phex, or if there are ZoneAlarm options that could free up the vsmon service without reducing the overall protection.

-Bob