Inner Space fails to load game multiple times

I'm so frustrated I could cry. Seriously. I just want the damn thing to work.

So I uninstalled Zone Alarm, rebooted. Had NO internet network. It somehow just disappeared, even after multi reboots. On Win7 it should auto detect and it did not. Called my ISP tech support, who recommended a system restore. Now I'm back online.

Which is why I was so reluctant to uninstall it to begin with. I work for a major ISP in internet billing (not collections) and deal with connectivity concerns all the time. I know that uninstalling virus/firewall programs can wreak all kinds of havoc. And so it did.

Any other way to try to troubleshoot this issue? I'd rather not go through that again.

To top it all off, I lost the character set and all the settings I had in IS. Geez >.<

If I put Zone Alarm on gaming mode it SEEMS to work better. I can log in both accounts, successfully, with less attempts. It's still not working very well, but it is working a bit better ...

using gaming mode in Zone Alarm doesn't improve my issue. I still have to reload the default rift profile many times before it will load. Then the character set, same thing.

It's like the the patcher doesn't load. So I looked at the Zone Alarm program permissions and enabled all Rift files in there as "trusted".

THIS seems to be the trick. Both instances of the game loaded fine. Here's hoping this is the fix.