Why Am I Always the Only One?

I have both a Roku Soundbridge and Zonealarm installed on my computer. If you own both of these items, you probably already know the problems that arise. No matter what I do, I cannot make them coexist. So, if I want to listen to music on my Soundbridge, I have to temporarily disable my Zonealarm. Soundbridge has an interesting feature that allows you to "telnet" into it in order to make some changes (such as manually set the IP address) or play around with the display.

But telnet is a communication program. And Zonealarm is designed to make it as difficult as possible for programs to communicate. As hard as I've tried to make Zonealarm usable, it's just not possible. I've tried:

* to add "telnet" as a program to Zonealarm. No matter how many times I try, it won't show up on the Zonealarm program list.
* add a rule in the zones to allow telnet to communicate. No matter how I configure the settings, it won't work.
* add a rule in the zones to allow any program in the Trusted zone to communicate. And it won't work.

So, here I am with a firewall that is overly aggressive. You'd think that, as long as Zonealarm has been on the market, someone would have already tripped across this problem. Nope, I'm the first. How do I know? Because I've scoured the Internet looking for something similar (Don't bother looking on Zonealarm's web site. It sucks.)

Every web site I've been to says the party line of, "Add "telnet" to your list of approved programs" and "Put your Soundbridge in the allowed zone". But neither of these options works. Further, there are many settings that are possible for both of these suggestions, but no one will tell you what settings to use.

No dice. I'm the first. Frankly, this is not one of those times when being the premiere on something has its advantages. It's no advantage at all. It just sucks.

Sigh.