Punkbuster with Battlefield2

I recently bought Battlefield2 from the EA website and downloaded it. I can play single player just fine but when I try the multi player mode, which requires punkbuster, it kicks me from the game saying communication failure, punkbusterb not initialising. I have sent support tickets to evenbalance.com but the advice they provided was not effective. They keep telling me that something in my computer is blocking it. I use zonealarm extreme security with their firewall. I made exceptions for them in the firewall and antivirus settings and even tried disabling zonealarm, to no avail. I have tried everything I can think of and can still not play the game in multi player mode. Any advice or information would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you very much for your time.

well
when installing it was their a option to install punkbuster ? and did you click it
if you type 'punkbusterb not initialising' into google you get a few things so read them

and theres a few updates or some thing here for that games punkbuster system:
http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=dl-bf2.php


what do you expect from a EA game lol

Yes, I did as you suggested. Punkbuster a seems to load as a service but the punkbuster b is the one with the problems. I have googled this issue repeatedly. Nothing I have found seems to work. I have even tried to uninstall and reinstall the game but it always ask me to insert the disk. Since I downloaded the game from ea, I have no disk so thats really not an option.

Would you by any chance be using Avast?

A friend of mine recently had problems playing Quake, same Punkbuster B problem as you, he changed his anti-virus and all is well now.

I had pnkbstra.exe issues for the longest time, make absolutely sure the exceptions are right and the service is not disabled, if that doesn't work, wait about 7 months and try agian, and make sure yur game is updated along wirh punkbuster