Goodbye ZoneAlarm!

I was a loyal ZoneAlarm firewall user for years. Despite its annoying prompts and resource-hogging, I stuck with it through multiple versions. Even after ZoneAlarm developer Check Point foolishly dropped the software’s cool red-and-yellow logo for the boring green-and-blue one, I still stuck with it.
Today, I uninstalled ZoneAlarm, and I am never installing it again. Here’s the sequence of events that led to this painful breakup.