Fascinating
As mentioned below, I have resolved what appeared to be a DNS problem but might have had other factors, such that Internet Explorer now connects to web sites, but Firefox continues to give “connection refused” errors.
Completely purging all signs of Firefox, downloading the latest, itself a grand adventure, and installing that changed absolutely nothing.
The adventure: In IE on the afflicted machine, the download link for Firefox Was. Not. There.
It was there in IE on my machine. Crazy.
So I manually typed in (and fortuitously copied to the clipboard) the URL for downloading Firefox. That gave me a series of errors because apparently the download gets hosted and then unhosted on various sites around the world. Apparently when you click the link and all is normal, Mozilla.org flips through randomly and then tries again if a host is bad, so you only see a masked download from a good mirror. When you do it from the address bar, manually, you get to find out that the first several sites are bad and eventually one works.
Got that downloaded. Dialup, you know. Ugh. Installed it and… same problem. WTF, over?
I am about out of ideas, and I would love for them to have Firefox because it’s the best malware protection, and doesn’t hose your internet connection like some of the firewall software seems to do.
As far as I can tell, DNS works and all that. The system seems to be clean as a whistle. What’s so clean about a whistle anyway? Especially after you have used it and blown microbubbles of germ-laden spittle into it? Anyway, the only thing I saw wrong on the last pass was the Services dialog stopped displaying anything on the “extended” tab, the individual services wouldn’t open in a new dialog when double-clicked in the regular view, and the internet connection refused to disconnect until I shut down the machine.
Clean as a used whistle, perhaps. Whether the virtual germs are visible or not....
Update:
The problem: Firefox gets “connection refused” no matter what site you try to visit with it.
The solution: Norton Firewall is installed. Not running. Not in the background as a service. Absolutely dead except still being physically present on the hard drive. Removing Norton Firewall eliminates Firefox from the “do not allow” list that somehow affects it even with Norton Firewall ostensibly as inert as a Ted Rall cartoon.
Of course, the overall issue was compound, as IE had been affected by the DNS problem that left it working while Firefox lagged.
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