No errors in device manager. Tried a TCP/IP fix but still same issue. As for protection, the only thing I've got is AVG and I installed that yesterday AFTER all of this began happening to check for viruses. Again, nothing found.
One thing of note, I performed a "netsh winsock reset" two days ago in an effort to fix a com surrogate error connected to a DIVX update. Could that have caused any of this? If so, how do I undo that?