I'm using Zone Alarm and haven't changed the default search engine or start page from Google, and I've never had any problem getting FR after installing, and between various versions and various computers I've probably installed 20 times. I think something went wrong during your install or your install just happenned to coincide with one of FR's accursed outages.
You know, I have had Zone Alarm for years too, but this time I have to actually turn it off to get access to FR and I am at my wits end trying to figure it out. If I try to access FR with ZA on, I get a message that Internet Explorer is unable to access the web page. As soon as I trun off ZA Internet Explorer has immediate access.
At first I thought it was Google, so I switched my search engine back but so far the only way to get here is to turn off ZA completely. Very frustrating week it has been!