Zone Alarm being a Bastard

Is there any way to make the recent version of Zone Alarm to act ONLY as a firewall? I'm sick of it trying to police my system: "rundll is trying to run blah blah blah do you want to allow it?" "explorer.exe may be trying to bypass security by running thisotherprogram.exe" "fuck you im in control of everything else your kernel tries to do, too"

If i use a previous version of ZoneAlarm, how insecure would I be?

The upgrade is pretty much just the look of It I -think- you should be able to just install the old one and use the same antivirus libraries and soforth without updating.