BleepingComputer.com: Vista blocking Firefox, AVG and others

Something is blocking access to download sites and internet access. I have Vista Home 32 bit on a HP Laptop. IE7 works fine, Outlook can receive emails and such.

AVG cannot update saying that it cannot connect to the internet. I can gt to the update site through IE but cannot download the update adn get a connection timeout.
Firefox cannot connect at all to the internet. I was able to download and install but not connect.
Adobe Flash will not download saying there is a timeout in the connection.

I'm thinking this is all due to the same problem. I have disabled the firewall as well as checked that all these are on the approved list.

Neither of these software's support sites have been of any help, including Microsoft. They all just point me to setting up a network connection.

Please help. I am at a loss.

Found my problem. When I purchased the pc there was a trial of Norton on there. Once the trial expired, I removed Norton and installed AVG. Little did I know that a Norton firewall was still hanging around causing connection issues. I used

http://www.trolly.homepage.t-online.de/EnumProcess.exe

to discover that it was running. Then I used

http://service1.symantec.co m/SUPPORT/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039

to remove it.

Problem solved. Hopefully this will help others as well.

Just to add to this, yesterday I caught Webroot SpySweeper and AVG in a conspiracy to stop a customer's email access.
The only symptoms were system slowness, and increased IO Reads for SpySweeper.
Uninstalled it, only to find the same issue with AVG.
Uninstalled it and all was well!