So the glitch is actually caused by ZoneAlarm, not by Microsoft's patch. 

It's hardly the first "glitch" of this kind in ZA, too. Ever since their deal with the israeli government, ZoneAlarm has gone downhill, and it's pretty obvious it has more backdoors than Sony's rootkit. All to keep us safe from the terrorists, of course.

Just a heads up: that new Microsoft patch also restored the simultaneous open connection limit in the TCPIP.SYS driver originally included in SP2. If you patched that limit away before, you might want to do it again; I saw a noticeable slowdown in my browsing since that patch. Search for a "TCPIP.SYS patch" and you can find it right away. It's old, but still seems to work fine for that.