Is my program being blocked by windows firewall?

[Fuzz13]

I have a program that sends a request online to get your routers IP address. I wrote the program on a machine that uses Zone Alarm as its primary firewall. When I run the program with Zone Alarm active it will ask me to authorize its access to the internet and when I do everything works fine. If Zone Alarm is not running however my internet calls are denied and I am uncertain why. It will continue to throw up a connection error until I start Zone Alarm and it begins working again. I also have it running on a server machine using win 7. The server does not use Zone Alarm but rather Windows Firewall. It for a time was unable to connect to the internet then seemingly resolved itself and began working. I can recreate the zone alarm not on issue on my pc but I can't figure out what might be causing the issue. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Aimee Bailey]

How do you mean when you say zone alarm is "not running"? Try accessing the internet via your browser while it's in this state, if you are able to navigate the net still, then there is something deeper going on.

Aimee.

[Fuzz13]

When I say zone alarm is not running I mean the program is not active. The equivalent of it being shut down. I am still able to navigate online without zone alarm being on/running so there is still internet connectivity, however when zone alarm is turned off/shutdown my program no longer reaches the internet to request an IP address or to send smtp messages.

[Aimee Bailey]

It seem's then that zone alarm has been delegated to deal with specific ports, and when you shut down zone alarm, those ports are automatically blocked as there is no zone alarm running to allow the connection to happen.

Considering this, I'm not really sure what your question is. Having this behaviour on one computer does mean you would encounter the same problem on another. Though it does show that the behaviour is correct.

If you would like to see your program work without zone alarm, then try testing it on a computer perhaps that relies on windows firewall instead for instance.

All the best.

Aimee.