"Exception Breakpoint" error

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hey guys, my laptop has been messing up for a while now with symptoms such as extreme lag, etc. but now it's gotten so bad that I can't even shut it down anymore unless I just hold the power button down and I know that's really bad for it.

What happens is that a dialog box pops up saying an exception breakpoint was reached at "bunch of number coordinates" and hit "ok" to terminate and "cancel" to debug but it never matters which of these I hit, the dialog boxes keep coming back up and when they finally go away, the computer is so lagged that you cant even open a my documents folder anyway.

i guess the most obvious question to ask is: what is going on?? and the next is: what do i do to fix it?

just to give you guys an idea of my hard drive layout, i have just major installed programs in my c: (firefox, etc) and maybe just 10gb worth of downloads in my d: drive. I have an external HD (g which is full of movies/files/etc. I stuck them in here bec. I was under the (probably mistaken?) impression that my computer wouldn't lag so much if I placed all my files in the external HD as opposed to in the computer?

also, i have a feeling maybe somehow my zonealarm program is somehow linked to the problem? because i've tried to uninstall it and everytime i do, the exception breakpoint stuff comes out, the uninstall fails and then the computer turns totally useless just like when i try to shut it down and it stays this way until I'm forced to manually shutdown by holding the power button down and then just turning it on again.

HELP

you guys are my only/last hope (heh, very princess leia > ben kenobi) since I'm in China right now and can still hardly order food much less explain my problems to some sort of tech support.

im using an HP 520 and Windows xp btw if that's at all relevant.

 

A few things.

First, keeping all of your movies on an external HDD isn't going to speed anything up. If anything, it would slow it down because the USB speed is slower than SATA. Now, if your internal HDD is 99% full with all of your media, then yes, it would slow things down...otherwise, it's safe to put everything on the internal HHD and use the external as a backup drive.

ZoneAlarm is known for breaking upon trying to uninstall it. Monty's link is a good place to start. IF that doesn't help, head of to ZA's forums.

Once you've got the ZA problem out of the way, you might want try out a registry cleaner/optimizer. CCleaner has a built in Reg cleaner...and since it's free, there's no reason you *shouldn't* be using CCleaner!

As for Lag issues, they reading my guide for the MSCONFIG utility. It might not cure all your problems, but it will help.

 

thanks guys. i followed the first link and tried to apply that solution first but the breakpoint error would occur even when i tried to upgrade to the latest version, argh!

i went on the forum though and found a do-it-yourself uninstall which took me several manual shutdowns before i finally got it to work, whew!

stupid zonealarm

 

Yeah...just upgrading usually doesn't fix the problem. You have to do a full/clean uninstall, remove a bunch of crap that ZA left behind, and then pray you got everything before you install the newest version.