Do the following:

You will lose any settings you made in ZoneAlarm.

1) If you have it checked, uncheck "load ZoneAlarm at startup" in the overview tab.
2) Reboot into safe mode. (This is not optional)
3) Go into the folder named internet logs, which is located in your windows directory. For windows 98/ME it's in c:\windows. For windows XP/NT/2000 this is c:\winnt. If you can't find it, do a search for it with "find files/folders".
4) Open the folder and delete everything in it.
5) Reboot into windows as you normally would and start ZoneAlarm manually.
6) Do your settings over. If you have ZoneAlarm Plus/Pro, do NOT restore the database unless you are absolutly sure it was backed up at a time when you experienced no problems.

Do not use the "backup and restore security settings" as this will just restore the corrupt database!

If you have any program/tweak that speeds up the shutdown of your computer, please say so.