Ok....now this may be a problem for many of you. I figured out my problem on my own. I have a nvidia geforce4 mx 4000 grafics card. It was updated about 5 months ago but went and checked for a new updated driver and found one. installed the new driver and wahlah everything works. So I'm assuming many of peoples problems will result from incompatible grafics cards or out of date drivers. Now I can access everything and all is good. Didn't have a darn thing to do with antivirus or firewall. Hope this helps others that may be experiencing the same prob.